Networking
How to decide whether a second internet connection is worth the cost, and how LTE, 5G and Starlink compare as backup paths for a business network.
Reviewed 2026-08-01 by the Machina IT engineering team.
If your phones, ERP, email, card processing or remote access run over the internet, a single circuit means a single point of failure for the business. The decision comes down to what an hour of downtime costs versus roughly the monthly price of a secondary connection — which for LTE or 5G backup is usually modest.
A backup circuit that nobody has failed over to is a monthly bill, not a plan. Firewalls need failover thresholds, VoIP and VPN behavior needs to be verified, and staff should know which applications degrade.
We test failover deliberately during a maintenance window so the first real outage isn't the experiment.
Common questions
Active calls often drop; new calls route over the backup within seconds. Some SIP configurations handle it more gracefully than others.
Rarely. Size it for the work that must continue, not for business as usual.
We review your network, security posture, cloud tenant and recovery plan, then hand you a plain-language report of what we found and what it means for the business.
