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Internet outage, second fiber backup or 4G/5G?

For an SMB depending on internet (calls, POS, customer portal) a second WAN is not optional. A second fiber via a different provider is the strongest, 4G/5G failover is cheaper and quicker to deploy.

Try this first

  1. 1Second fiber: order from a different provider than your primary (KPN alongside Eurofiber, or Online.nl alongside KPN). Two distinct cables down two different streets means a digger incident does not floor you.
  2. 24G/5G modem as failover: a SIM in a 4G/5G router (Teltonika, MikroTik LtAP, Cradlepoint) takes over when primary fails. Cheaper than fiber, enough for mail and calls, tight for video.
  3. 3Failover mechanism: your firewall (PfSense, OPNsense, FortiGate) runs dual-WAN with automatic failover. Detection via ping to a public target, switches in seconds.
  4. 4Practical: for a 10-person office with VoIP and cloud tools, 4G/5G failover is almost always worth it. For a 30-person office with a customer portal or e-commerce, consider second fiber.

When to bring us in

Dual-WAN failover with session persistence (so a Teams call does not drop) is not trivial. We have done this often, ask for the runbook.

See also

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