I kept telling small business owners to skip the backup internet line until I saw a $1,800 invoice from one outage

Quinn Grant · 2026-10-28T19:20:04.452557+00:00

For the last two years I've been helping local shops around Dayton set up their networks, and my advice was always the same: one solid fiber line is plenty, a second connection is wasted money. Then last month a bakery I work with had their main line cut by a contractor doing sidewalk work, and they were down from 9am until almost 5pm on a Friday. They lost about $1,800 in walk-in sales plus a catering order they couldn't process because the card reader and their ordering tablet were both dead. Now I'm second guessing my whole pitch, because a cheap backup connection with automatic failover would have cost them maybe $60 a month. I'm curious what folks here actually run for failover, and whether you go with a second wire from a different provider or something like a cellular router as a stopgap. Also, how do you test that the failover actually works before you find out the hard way?

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I kept telling small business owners to skip the backup internet line until I saw a $1,800 invoice from one outage | Business Internet - Rigidtalk