Your Home Internet Needs a Backup Plan

Last month the fibre line to my building was cut by a road crew at 10:40 on a Tuesday. I found out because a call dropped mid-sentence and my laptop quietly switched to a hotspot I had forgotten was on.

The outage lasted six hours. I got through it because of a prepaid SIM and a habit I picked up during the pandemic. Most people I know have exactly one internet connection and no plan for the day it stops.

This is the least exciting article on this site, and possibly the most useful.

Why one line is not enough anymore

Broadband used to be entertainment. Now it is the phone line, the office, the school, the bank and half the delivery notifications in your life. A single fibre strand hanging from a pole is a single point of failure for all of it — and fibre gets cut constantly. Road work, rats, water in a joint box, a contractor unplugging the wrong port at 2am.

The internet providers are not lying about reliability. They are quoting a monthly average, and averages do not help you on the one day you need it.

Three levels of backup, cheapest first

Level 1 — phone hotspot. Free if you already pay for data. It is fine for email and a call, painful for a video meeting, and useless if your phone is on the same tower that just went down. Still, everyone should know how to turn it on and what their plan’s hotspot limit is.

Level 2 — a second connection on a different technology. This is the sweet spot. A 4G or 5G router on a prepaid or cheap postpaid plan, sitting on a different network than your fibre. Because it is a different pipe, a cut cable does not affect it.

Level 3 — automatic failover. A router that watches the main line and switches to the backup by itself. You notice nothing except a two-second blip. This is what offices do, and it is now cheap enough for a flat.

What to actually buy

If you want minimum effort: a 5G router from a carrier, on a different network from your broadband, with a monthly plan you can pause. Put it on a shelf, leave it charged, forget about it. When the line dies, change the Wi-Fi network on your laptop.

If you want it to be invisible: a router with dual-WAN support and a USB or Ethernet port for the backup. You tell it “this is primary, this is backup, switch when the primary fails twice in a row”. Most mid-range routers do this now.

A word of warning on the cheap ones: many routers advertise “failover” but have no way to detect a dead internet connection — only a dead cable. If the fibre is up but the provider’s network is down, they never switch. You want a router that can ping something and decide for itself.

The setup nobody thinks about

Power. Your router and your fibre box need electricity. A small UPS or a power bank with a 12V output keeps them alive for an hour or two, which covers most cuts. Without it, a perfect failover plan dies with the mains.

DNS. When your provider’s DNS goes down with the line, nothing resolves even if the backup is up. Set a public resolver on the router so name lookups do not depend on one company.

A test you actually run. Once a month, unplug the main cable and see what happens. If you have never tested the failover, you do not have failover — you have a hope.

A note on your phone. Keep the hotspot name and password written somewhere you can find when the internet is down. That sounds silly until the day you need it.

What this costs

A backup connection is roughly the price of one streaming subscription per month, and a UPS is a one-time cost about the same as a decent dinner. Compare that to a lost workday, a missed payment, or a client call that dropped at the worst moment.

I am not suggesting everyone needs enterprise redundancy. But if your income depends on being reachable, one line is a bet you are making every day without noticing.

The five-minute version

1. Check what your phone’s hotspot limit is, and that you know how to enable it.
2. Find out which network your broadband uses, then buy a cheap plan on a different one.
3. Put the router and fibre box on a UPS.
4. Set a public DNS on the router.
5. Once a month, pull the main cable and watch what happens.

That’s it. Six hours of downtime turned into a minor annoyance for me, and the whole setup cost less than the phone I am typing this on.

See you in the next one.