Cheat Sheet: What happens if my ISP goes bust?

If your internet provider were to suddenly shut down, how would your business cope?

Is this something we need to worry about? It’s 2017, not 1999. When was the last time a major ISP went offline without warning?

A lot more recently than you might think. Last December, fast.co.uk and several associated brands abruptly closed down, leaving subscribers high and dry. An announcement was posted online, but their customers couldn’t read it, having been disconnected and all.

The thing to understand is that ISPs operate in a tight financial gap, between the fixed rates they charge their customers and the variable rates they pay for upstream links and other expenses. This is difficult to manage for any business. Look at airlines, for example: they’ve certainly been known to go bust in the past, with such dire consequences that the industry now has built-in insurance. Sadly, there’s no such protection for internet access.

My business should be safe, though, surely? We have a total service contract from a specialist supplier who handles these things for us.

I’m afraid that means you’re more at risk, not less: if you’re relying on multiple companies, there’s a greater chance that one of them will let you down. And if your ISP does go out of business, your intermediary will find itself suddenly having to migrate not just one customer to a new connection, but several – or, perhaps, hundreds. You don’t want to be sitting in a triaged priority queue while that’s being sorted out.

So how can we protect ourselves? Should we be running two internet connections at once all the time?

Running two lines is a good idea anyway, as it gives you extra flexibility to manage a diverse internet usage profile. Clearly, though, if your multiple lines come from the same ISP, they won’t help if the provider goes down. Dealing with multiple lines also complicates things internally: combining several diverse links into a high-availability connection is a complex business, and it probably won’t quite do all the things you want it to. It’s one thing to implement a failover system for outbound connections; inbound ones are a lot less easy.

Isn’t high availability overkill anyway? We don’t need microsecond access to the world’s financial markets!

Very true. As long as you have a second line then, in an emergency, you should be able to handle the switchover yourself without too much upheaval. You might even already have such a line for your VoIP phones, and as long as those continue to work, you know it’s up and running. So when the bad thing happens, you can simply flip over to that second DSL line. It might be a bit slower than your main connection, but it will keep you in business.

Our router has a slot for a SIM. Can’t we simply switch to mobile data until a new contract is signed?

You can, but performance is likely to be very limited compared to your main business-grade internet link. You can also expect to pay a lot more for your mobile data services. And it’s worth noting that such links are rarely set up for incoming connections, VPNs and so forth. At a pinch, a mobile connection will let employees check their email, but you wouldn’t want to run your business on it for a prolonged period.

Let’s say we don’t have a backup plan when our ISP goes out of business: how long is it likely to take until we can get back online?

“As long as you have a second line then, in an emergency, you should be able to handle the switchover yourself”

It’s almost impossible to make any promises, as there are no fixed procedures within the industry to deal with this issue. In fact, the procedures that are in place may well slow you down, as they’re intended to stop lines being hijacked or accidentally disconnected. I normally suggest that it will take two weeks to supply a new line to a convenient, simple location; you can add at least half a week to that for the toing and froing involved in proving that you are the rightful “owner” of the line that’s there already. Many firms in this situation simply order a new line and let the old one lapse because it’s administratively much simpler.