The Internet Still Goes Down. Nobody Notices.

An auto repair shop kept losing its internet, several times a month. The carrier had been out multiple times, and the drops never stopped.

A few years ago that would have been an annoyance. For this shop it was a business outage, because like most shops now, its register lives online in a cloud point of sale with a card processor behind it. When the circuit dropped, the register effectively disappeared.

• No ringing out customers, with cars finished and people at the counter waiting to pay
• No card processing, in a business where almost nobody pays any other way
• No ordering parts, so jobs stalled in the bays mid-repair
• Repeated carrier visits that never stopped the drops

When a business moves its point of sale and parts ordering online, its internet connection becomes the cash drawer. Most businesses make that move without revisiting what happens when the one connection into the building goes quiet, and this shop was finding out several times a month.

We didn't promise to fix the carrier's line, because nobody outside the carrier can promise that. Chasing the drops was the carrier's job, and months of it had gone nowhere. What we could own was making the drops stop mattering.

Tech Dynamix installed an LTE backup, a cellular connection behind the shop's main business internet circuit. It takes over automatically the moment the primary drops and hands back when the primary returns, so nobody has to flip a switch or move a cable. The automatic part matters, because a backup that needs a person to notice the outage will fail at lunchtime on the shop's busiest Saturday.

The register stays online through the cellular connection, so cards process and parts get ordered as usual. When the primary circuit comes back a few minutes later, traffic moves back to it, and the only record of the drop is in the logs.

The backup has been in place for over a year, and the shop hasn't had a noticed outage since.

The internet still goes down. The primary circuit still drops for a few minutes several times a month, and nobody in the building notices. The only people who know are us, because we're the ones watching the logs.

• Over a year without an outage anyone experienced
• Card payments and parts ordering available through every drop
• The same unreliable circuit underneath, made irrelevant instead of fixed
• Nothing for staff to do during a drop, and no waiting on hold with the carrier while a customer stands at the counter

The lesson applies to any business whose payments or orders live in the cloud. Reliability has two suppliers: the carrier, whose line will sometimes fail no matter whose name is on it, and whoever designs what happens next. You can't buy a circuit that never drops, but you can arrange for the drop to be a line in a log instead of something your customers stand through.

An LTE backup is a small piece of equipment, and it costs far less than an afternoon of finished cars and no way to take payment. If your register or ordering depends on one internet connection, our networking and infrastructure team can look at what happens when it drops.