When the internet fails

The way I work as a translator involves spending almost every working hour on the internet.

About a year or so ago I got wondering about what would happen if our network connection went down for any reason. I noticed an agency we did some work for had a backup ISP and decided to get one of my own - a cable-based solution which was thus completely independent from the phone-based one.

Although this did get us cable tv into the bargain it seemed like a rather expensive luxury, until our ISP did crash a week or so ago.

This was a bit of a panic, but fortunately did not happen right before a massive deadline. I had my wired backup solution working within minutes, but since the cable socket is not in our office, this involved a fair bit of running up and down stairs with a USB key before I plucked up the courage to install a wireless router we had lying around and configure my desktop machine for wifi.

The cable wifi connection actually turned out slightly faster than the phoneline adsl, but the big loss was our adsl phone line, which is our business number. I could get answerphone messages (which are e-mailed to me as audio files - a cool feature which means you can check your answerphone from any cybercafé) but not use or answer the phone. Meanwhile our cable package also had a phone line so we could at least phone out at no extra cost.

Anyway, all due credit to our ISP and France Telecom: I reported the breakdown on a Friday morning; by Monday morning the ISP technician had been and established the fault was with France Telecom, by Monday afternoon the FT technician had been too, and by about 30 minutes later he had been to the exchange and flicked back the switch they had inadvertently flipped switching off our unbundling.

I guess if our backup had failed it would have been a case of sitting in McDonalds and muddling through. But with hindsight, the experience was reassuring.

As working from home and self-employment increases, I wonder how many people have given thought to what to do in a similar situation.