Does five hours without the Internet send you back to the Stone Age? According to WSMV Channel 4 in Nashville, it does.
On August 4, much of the Tennessee Valley was without internet and phone service from 2 pm to 7 pm. The outages were reported in the Nashville, Chattanooga and Knoxville areas in Tennessee.
Outages are also reported in Huntsville, AL, and Bowling Green, Lexington, and Louisville, KY. Smaller outages were also reported in Indianapolis, Chicago, Columbus and Cleveland, OH, Washington, DC, New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
More than 11,000 AT&T customers reported outages to DownDetector.com. AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon experienced issues ranging from hardware problems to a possible cut fiber optic cable.
It was a bad day if you rely on the Internet for commerce. Many retail stores could only accept cash and some couldn’t do transactions of any kind.
That’s more than an inconvenience. That’s lost revenue.
When you can’t serve customers, like this gas station, your business ends up losing thousands of dollars.
“Sorry, there’s nothing we can to about this,” doesn’t have to be what employees tell potential customers before they turn them away. There are things businesses can do to protect their internet connections. The main one is to have more than one connection, and to have a method to automatically fail over to the working connection.
Since smaller Internet Service Providers sometimes resell the services of larger providers, it’s important to make sure the different Internet links traverse physically different cabling. A telecom agent, system integrator or Managed Service Provider can help any business determine the more cost-effective way to do this.
Network resilience and redundancy isn’t something only large enterprises invest in. Every business needs a plan for business continuity. When the risk is losing thousands of dollars by doing nothing, it’s well worth looking into. Take control of your business Internet before the next inevitable outage.
Want to keep track of how your business Internet connection is performing? Get outage alerts when you sign up for Ecessa’s free ISP Health Check.
Knowledge is power. For more information about how to protect your business against Internet downtime, contact our team of experts.