When your internet drops, count what actually stops. Email, obviously. Cloud apps freeze mid-keystroke. The phones die too, because they’re VoIP now, which surprises a remarkable number of people on the day. EFTPOS stops taking money. Staff hover. Customers get a busy signal and try your competitor, who answers.

Put numbers on it and the picture sharpens fast. For a 50-person business, an hour of total outage lands somewhere between $5,000 and $15,000 in lost productivity and missed sales. At 200 people it’s $40,000 to $80,000. An hour. And the average repair time for a single fibre or NBN fault is four to eight hours; if it involves digging, days.

The DR plan blind spot

Most businesses that size have a disaster recovery plan, and it’s usually a decent one, about data. Backups, replication, recovery objectives, all rehearsed. Then a storm takes out one cable in one pit, no data is harmed at all, and the business still goes dark, because nobody can call in and nobody can work. The layer customers actually interact with, the phones and the connection, never made it into the plan.

A communications outage is in some ways worse than a data incident: it’s public, it’s immediate, and every minute of it is customer-facing.

What the insurance costs

Protection against this is a known quantity with a price list, and the economics are worth seeing plainly.

• 4G/5G backup sits idle behind your fibre, and when the fibre dies, traffic fails over automatically within about a minute. It’s survival-level bandwidth, enough for phones, email and the essentials. Cost: a small monthly fee on top of the primary link, against those hourly numbers above. This is the option most businesses should have and most don’t.
• Dual connections, both live, from separate carriers, sharing load until one fails and the other silently carries everything. The standard for sites where an outage is intolerable. Cost: roughly 1.8 times a single connection.
• Diverse physical paths for the truly critical: two fibres are worthless if they run through the same pit and one excavator finds them both. Getting entry from opposite ends of the building through separate ducts is an option carriers offer, if someone knows to demand it.

Two traps in the fine print. Failover must be automatic; a backup that needs someone on-site to notice the outage and re-plug a router is a backup that fails after hours. And your critical inbound numbers (the 1300 line, the numbers revenue arrives on) need routing that survives the site itself, so calls flow to mobiles or another office rather than into a dead PBX.

Matching the spend to the risk

Not every site deserves the gold standard, and this is where the cost discipline matters as much as the resilience. We’ve seen businesses with no backup link at their revenue-critical head office and fully redundant fibre at a depot that could run on paper for a week. The right answer is an outage-cost figure per site, matched against the price of protecting it, decided deliberately instead of by history.

The other half is testing. A failover that has never been exercised is a hope, not a plan. It gets tested the same way anything does: deliberately, on a quiet afternoon, before the storm does it for you at quarter-end.

Find out where you’re exposed

A Telco Health Check covers resilience alongside cost: which of your sites are one cable cut from silence, what an hour offline costs at each, and where you’re paying for protection a site doesn’t need. It’s the same review either way, and it costs nothing to find out where you stand.