Choosing the Right Connection – and Building in Resilience When It’s Mission Critical

When choosing connectivity, it’s important to think about how vital the service is to your business. Being offline or experiencing an outage more often than not means downtime. 
A lower-cost option might work fine most of the time, but it’s often in an emergency that you realise just how much you rely on your connection.

Ask yourself:

• If your internet went down, how much impact would it have?
• Could you still take card payments?
• Would your phones work?
• Would your till system still operate?
• Would your CCTV or door entry systems be affected?
• Could you still send or receive emails?
• Could you update your website or socials to let customers know there’s an issue?
• How much could it cost you in lost sales, lost productivity, or paying staff who can’t work?

The financial and operational impact can quickly add up including lost customers and reputational damage.

More Than Just Speed and Price

While speed and price matter, they’re not the only things to consider. You should also look at:

• Service Level Agreement (SLA): An uptime of 99.5% sounds good, but it could still mean hours of allowed downtime built in to per year.
• Compensation: Some services offer 100% uptime guarantees with money-back if the fault is on the supplier’s side.
• Cause of Downtime: Not all outages are network faults – issues can also be caused by something as simple as unplugged cables, damaged wiring, or even a missed payment.

Typical Service Types

Broadband Services

• Generally lower cost
  
• Bandwidth shared with other users
  
• Asymmetrical upload and download speeds (more download than upload)
• Best-effort repair times – sometimes 1–2 working days or longer (these vary)

Leased Line / Dedicated Services

• Symmetrical upload and download speeds
  
• Dedicated to your business – no contention, no sharing of bandwidth
  
• SLAs with guaranteed response and fix times (often within hours)
  
• Higher uptime guarantees

There are variations within each category, and carriers often offer enhanced support options.

Tailored Support – Not Just 9 to 5

At HM Network, we work with various providers and we can provide and extra level of support. We know that not all businesses run Monday to Friday, 9–5. A restaurant chain, bar, or nightclub has completely different peak hours and needs. That’s why we offer bespoke support contracts – including evenings, weekends, and even 24/7 cover – so you can speak to someone who can escalate and resolve issues when it matters most.

Building in Resilience – Because Things Happen

No matter how good your main connection is, unexpected issues can still happen. That’s why it’s worth having a conversation about secondary connections.

Things to consider:

• Type of connection – Dedicated leased line / Ethernet Fibre, broadband, 4G/5G, or other options
  
• SLA and speed
  
• Active vs. passive setup – Always-on or only active when needed
• Configuration – Automatic failover vs. manual switch
• SD WAN – Utilising multiple connection types in a much smarter way

It’s a “how long is a piece of string” discussion, but one that can save you a lot of stress, time, and money. Too often, this conversation only happens after a costly outage – when it’s already too late.

Let’s talk.
Whether you need advice on your primary connection, a resilience plan, or a tailored support package, HM Network can help.

Contact us today to make sure your business is ready for anything.