A backhoe two miles away does not know your company exists. Neither does the driver who clipped a utility pole, or the crew doing scheduled maintenance on the neighborhood fiber cabinet. Any one of them can switch your business off for a morning. The phones go quiet because they are internet phones. The card reader stops taking cards. The cloud apps you run everything on are suddenly on the other side of a dead wire.
Here is the part that stings. Everyone stays on the clock. Payroll runs perfectly during an internet outage. Production does not. And yet the fix for all of this usually costs less per month than one good office lunch run, which is why we consider a backup internet connection the cheapest insurance in IT. Let’s do the math first, then fix the problem.
The Real Math: Wages Times Dead Hours
You do not need a consultant’s formula. Take your number of employees, multiply by their average hourly cost including taxes and benefits, and that is what an hour of downtime costs in wages alone. Ten people at 30 dollars an hour is 300 dollars an hour to accomplish nothing. A four-hour outage is 1,200 dollars in payroll, before you count the missed calls, the stalled orders, and the customer who could not reach you and called your competitor instead.
Industry surveys agree with the napkin. In the 2025 Calyptix and ITIC survey of 715 small and mid-sized businesses, 37 percent said a single hour of downtime costs them between 1,000 and 5,000 dollars, and 8 percent put the number above 25,000 dollars an hour. Your number is probably smaller than the scary headlines suggest. It is also probably bigger than you think, because dead hours never show up as a line item on any report.
Why a Second Cable Is Not a Backup Plan
The instinctive fix is a second wired connection from a different provider. Sometimes that helps. Often it does not, because both providers ride the same physical infrastructure: the same poles, the same underground conduit, sometimes the very trench the backhoe just found. A cut line or a neighborhood outage takes them both down together, and you have paid twice for one failure.
This is the detail most businesses miss. Your internet connection is not just your provider. It is every splice, cabinet, and pole between your office and the rest of the world, none of which you control. Redundancy only counts if the second path shares nothing with the first. Ask where a backup line would physically run. If the honest answer is the same pole line as everyone else on your street, that is redundancy on paper only.
The Case for Starlink as the Backup Line
This is why we like Starlink as a failover connection for offices. It is satellite internet, which means your traffic goes straight up to space and skips the local ground infrastructure entirely. The cut fiber line does not matter. The flooded cabinet does not matter. The outage taking down half the county does not touch you, because you are not using anything the county shares.
And satellite service is no longer the sluggish last resort it was a decade ago. Business.org’s 2026 review of Starlink’s business service lists advertised download speeds of up to 135 to 310 megabits per second on its local priority plans, latency in the range of roughly 25 to 60 milliseconds, and plans starting at 55 dollars a month. That is real, workable internet: video calls, cloud apps, card readers, phones. As a primary connection, the data allowances give most offices pause. As a standby line with no contract attached, it is close to perfect.
Automatic Failover, So Nobody Has to Notice
A backup connection someone has to plug in manually is a backup connection nobody uses correctly at 9 a.m. on a Monday. The right setup is automatic. A business-grade router or firewall watches your primary connection with constant health checks, and the moment the fiber goes quiet, it moves all traffic to Starlink in seconds. When the fiber comes back, traffic moves back. Most of your staff never finds out it happened. A few details make or break the setup.
- Fail over everything that matters: phones, card readers, and remote access, not just the computers. This is the configuration detail DIY setups skip most often.
- Test it monthly: unplug the primary connection on purpose and watch what happens. A failover that has never been tested is a theory, not a plan.
- Point traffic home again: set the router to prefer the wired line whenever it is healthy, so the standby plan’s data allowance stays available for the day you actually need it.
The Power Half of the Problem
Here is the piece almost everyone forgets. A good share of “internet outages” are actually power outages, and the short ones are the worst offenders. A two-second flicker from a summer storm reboots your modem, router, switches, and Wi-Fi, and the network spends the next ten minutes coming back up in the wrong order while your team refreshes their screens and wonders who to blame.
The fix costs about as much as a decent office chair: battery backup units, called UPS units, on the network equipment. Put the modem, router, main switch, wireless gear, and the Starlink kit on batteries, and a power blip becomes a non-event. The internet stays up, laptops keep running on their own batteries, and the workday simply continues. Pair the failover connection with battery power and your business shrugs off the two most common outages in North Texas: the cut line and the flickering grid. If your operations lean on cloud services, this matters double. As we wrote in The Cloud Can Go Down, the app being up does not help you if your path to it is down.
The Bottom Line
Downtime is a cost you pay in full, in cash, every single time: wages times dead hours, plus whatever revenue walked out the door. The fix is boring, cheap, and proven. A Starlink dish on the roof that ignores local infrastructure entirely. A router that fails over automatically in seconds. Battery backups so a power flicker cannot take the network down with it. One avoided outage usually pays for the whole year of standby service.
We design and install automatic failover setups, Starlink included, for businesses across Denton County, and we test them so you know they will catch you. If you would like to know what an hour of downtime actually costs your company, we will run the numbers with you, no charge and no pressure. Contact us today.
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