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The recent “power failure” at a major exchange in Birmingham saw hundreds of thousands of BT’s customers across the UK cut off, with businesses losing a vital link to their customers.
Social networks were soon alive with chatter from affected homes and businesses with varying tales of desperation and impact the disruption from BT broadband was causing.
This latest incident while more wide spread is not unique with businesses typically facing some sort of interruption to connectivity on average 3 times a year.
The financial cost of the disruption to businesses may never be known but it is widely accepted that some businesses never fully recover from a prolonged loss of services.
Business continuity will undoubtedly be at the forefront of many business owners’ minds, wishing to protect their business from a repetition of the loss, and professionals in the sector are consequently looking at new and innovative solutions to tackle communications issues.
Ade Smith, MD of Pressure Integrity said “as a small business we rely heavily on our telephony and internet access, when these were lost our route to market was also cut, and we feared we would start to lose business quickly”, Ade added “we knew we needed a solution but without big business budgets we could not simply move to another site, we needed alternative communications and quickly.”
The good news is that with technological advances made in the UK there is expertise and innovative solutions that can be employed to protect businesses from the effects of such an event in the future.
Grant Chambers of Buzz Connect, a south coast based technology company, commented ‘We are seeing growing enquiry levels for instant disaster recovery and fail over continuity solutions’, he added ‘with more businesses using cloud computing, increased emphasis on remote workers, as well as reliance on telephony and internet access, having always on systems is paramount’.
He added ‘this is where 3G communications technologies come into their own, providing instant alternative connectivity for when ADSL or telephony fail. Having low cost and reliable portable solutions are today’s intelligent choices. Using an instant broadband device such as our unique Hubba, Pressure Integrity were up and running again within moments of the unit powering up, providing 3Mbps download and 1Mbps upload.’
There will undoubtedly be network disruptions in the future with businesses left to count the cost, however, with new technologies such as the Hubba, the impact can be greatly reduced.