Did you know that 4G failover solutions can boost your business profits?
We know, that’s a pretty bold claim — especially considering that 4G has been around for a while and you probably would’ve heard of it by now if it was so beneficial.
Or would you?
The potential ROI benefits of 4G aren’t really obvious to many business and IT managers for the simple fact that the ubiquity, throughput, low enough latency, and reliability of 4G as a backup isn’t clearly evident unless you examine closer.
Fortunately, here at Wired Networks, we get to do this every single day, so we get to see first-hand how 4G is a business game-changer. But don’t just take our word for it.
Here’s a real life case study:
A regional bank with 50 mortgage locations and 50 bank locations recently partnered with Wired Networks. They started by utilizing 4G/LTE as a backup network for their 50 mortgage locations for a couple years. After partnering with us, they’ve were able to decrease their down-time from 0.5% to .01% downtime.
Okay, you might be thinking, that’s really not that much of a difference. Well just wait until we show you the numbers…
Total Hours of Network Downtime
| 99.50% Uptime | 99.99% Uptime | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 site – total hours down per month | 3.6 hrs | 4.38 min |
| 1 site – total hours down per year | 43.2 hrs | 52.56 min |
| 50 sites – total hours down per month | 180 hrs | 3.65 hrs |
| 50 sites – total hours down per year | 2,160 hrs | 43.8 hrs |
As you can see from the chart, 0.50% downtime translates to 3.6 hours of downtime per site per month. If you multiply that times 50 sites, that’s 180 hours of total downtime per month.
Granted, not all of this downtime can be correlated to business hours. So, for argument’s sake, let’s say one-third of downtime occurs during business hours since there’s an 8 hr work day and 24 hours in a day.
Work Hours of Network Downtime
| 99.50% Uptime | 99.99% Uptime | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 site – work hours down per month | 1.2 hrs | 1.46 min |
| 1 site – work hours down per year | 14.4 hrs | 17.52 min |
| 50 sites – work hours down per month | 60 hrs | 1.21 hrs |
| 50 sites – work hours down per year | 720 hrs | 14.6 hrs |
One-third of 180 hours is 60 hours per month, and 12 months a year is 720 hours per year. With 50 locations, that’s roughly 14.4 hours of downtime per site per year.
Now, let’s look at how we were able to reduce that inefficiency.
The 99.99% guaranteed uptime we offer still has .01% downtime, or 4.38 minutes per month per site. Again, 50 sites at 4.38 minutes per site is 3.65 hours per month across all sites. But not all of that downtime is during business hours, so we’ll divide that by three to represent the 8 business hours in an average work day. The total comes to 1.21 hours of downtime per month across all sites during business hours, or 14.52 hours per year for all sites.
In the example above, our 4G failover solutions were able to take network downtime for each location from 14.4 hours of downtime per site per year during business hours to 17.5 minutes per site per year.
For most business owners, these kind of results would be enough to justify exploring additional failover options — and that’s exactly what the client asked us to do for the bank side of the business.
Needless to say, it wasn’t a hard sell, considering we’d proven on the mortgage side that 4G is just as cost-effective as a T-1 for about one-tenth of the cost of a T-1 on the service side and half the cost on the hardware side.
As for profits, you can see right away that a business experiencing an hour of downtime during working hours across all locations (in this case 50+ hours) is going to lose significant money. If you’ve ever personally experienced network downtime, we have a feeling you’ll understand when we say that it’s not just about the actual downtime, but also the residual effects of downtime that adds to the overall profit loss.
The real question is how much downtime costs your business in lost profits.
While we can’t answer that question definitively until we know more about your specific business, what we can say for sure is this number is north of $0 and the disruption it causes tends to linger past the incident itself due to people going home or losing productivity for longer than the actual outage itself.
The bottom line is 4G is improving companies’ profits because it allows businesses to remain productive with minimal disruption to day-to-day tasks for employees or IT staff. This benefit is accomplished by backing up a primary circuit or even acting as a primary circuit in a pinch.
We’ve seen how 4G benefits businesses time and again, and it continues to surprise our clients with its ubiquity and reliability.
We’re here to tell you 4G failover solutions are a game-changer for your business and a no-brainer for to increase profits. If you want to explore the potential ROI of this more, please check out our free downtime calculator.
