5G backup for small business networks

When the internet drops

Your phones, card terminals and the cloud software your staff use all depend on the internet. Every internet provider has outages, and while yours is down, you miss calls and lose sales.

A business needs a way to keep working through an outage. A second internet provider is the usual fix, but many small businesses find it hard to justify paying steep monthly rates for a business line they’d rarely use.

The UniFi 5G Backup

The UniFi 5G Backup gives your network a cellular connection to fall back on, and it’s been extremely popular with our clients. It’s $99, and Ubiquiti’s data plans start at $60 a year. The $60 plan has enough data for the short outages most offices see, and you can add more at any time.

It uses RedCap, a lighter version of 5G that tops out at 220 Mbps. In our experience, RedCap stays connected more reliably than full 5G, and for a backup, uptime matters more than speed.

For sites that need high speeds over cellular, Ubiquiti makes the UniFi 5G Max, which uses full 5G and reaches up to 3.4 Gbps, good as a primary connection or a high-speed failover.

A separate path to the internet

5G connects over the air, so it keeps working when your wired line is cut. That’s where it beats a second cable or fiber provider. Wired providers tend to run their lines along the same poles and trenches, so a single cut can take out both.

The trade-off is latency. 5G tends to have more of it than a wired line, which is workable, but not ideal, for calls over the internet.

What stays online on the backup

When we install a 5G Backup, we set rules in UniFi’s Policy Engine that decide which traffic the backup carries. Guest Wi-Fi and streaming video and music are cut off so they don’t eat through the data. Business phones, card terminals and the websites and cloud apps your staff use stay online.

How the 5G Backup helps our clients

A 5G Backup kept a landscaping office in Dawsonville online when its internet provider canceled the line by mistake. A Marietta service center added one when it switched back to Xfinity.