A major ice storm knocks out power to your building. A backhoe severs the fiber conduit two blocks away. A burst pipe takes out your server room. These aren't hypotheticals for Ohio businesses — they're regular occurrences. The question isn't whether your infrastructure will be tested. It's whether you've designed it to survive.
The Telecom Components of Business Continuity
Most business continuity plans address data backup and recovery reasonably well. What they often miss are the communication systems that everything else depends on: voice, internet, and the applications that run over them.
A complete telecom continuity plan covers three things: internet redundancy, voice failover, and remote access for your team.
Internet Redundancy
A single internet connection is a single point of failure. For businesses where connectivity is operationally critical, the answer is dual-path redundancy: a primary fiber circuit and a secondary connection on a different physical path and, ideally, a different carrier. 4G/LTE failover is a cost-effective secondary option — a cellular backup router activates automatically when your primary circuit goes down and routes traffic until it recovers.
Voice Failover
If your phone system depends on your internet connection (SIP trunks, UCaaS), your phones go down when your internet goes down — unless you've planned for it. Cloud phone systems handle this better than on-premise: most UCaaS platforms allow you to configure call routing rules that activate automatically during an outage, forwarding calls to mobile numbers, a remote office, or an answering service.
For on-premise systems, SIP trunk failover to cellular or a secondary provider can be configured at the carrier level with no changes to your phone system.
Remote Access
Your team needs to work if they can't reach the office. This means: cloud-based or remotely accessible phone extensions, VPN or SASE access to internal applications, and clear communication to employees about how to connect. Businesses that solved this during COVID still have the infrastructure in place. Those that haven't face a full crisis every time something goes wrong at the office.
Testing Your Plan
A continuity plan you've never tested is not a plan — it's a document. At least once a year, simulate a failure and verify the response: does the failover internet activate? Do calls route correctly? Can your team access what they need from home? Document what breaks and fix it before the next real event.
What a Good Plan Looks Like
For a typical 20–50 person Ohio business, a solid telecom continuity setup looks like: primary fiber + LTE failover router, UCaaS with mobile app and call forwarding rules, cloud-based file access (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace), and a documented "work from anywhere" runbook for staff. Total monthly cost for the redundancy components: typically $150–$300/month over a single-path setup. Cost of an unplanned outage: often multiples of that per hour.
Get a Free Assessment from Buckeye Telecom →