No fibre line will give you perfect 100% uptime. Fibre to the home lines often come with a ‘best effort’ SLA from the fibre network, and it can sometimes take a few days to restore a fibre line.
If you work from home or have critical services like alarm systems, we suggest you look at adding a backup connection.
Backup connectivity options #
- 2nd fibre line – 1st prize, but more expensive and not always available
- GSM / LTE modem – cost-effective, almost always available, but needs monitoring
- Fixed LTE – fixed monthly cost, usually available, check coverage
- WISP / FWA – fixed monthly cost, check coverage
Hardware required #
You’ll need to get a router which has more than one WAN port, and which can detect a failure on the primary WAN port. The router will then switch over to the backup link and also switch back to the primary link once that’s available again. Please email our support team if you need advice on a router which supports a backup link.
Cost #
Expect to pay about R2000 for the hardware and about R700/m for the backup link. There are less expensive options. Keep in mind that if you choose a service which is billed per MB – you could run up a big bill or quickly run out of data on a SIM card.
Monitoring and Notifications #
If you use a service which does not have a fixed monthly fee (cost per MB), we suggest you enable monitoring and notifications. Routers can often warn you when they are running on the backup link. Have a look at:
SIM Control: https://simcontrol.co.za/pricing
