📡Making LTE Failover Work for Businesses | Managing Bandwidth When Fibre Goes Down🌐

In the world of business connectivity, fibre is often the gold standard for speed, reliability, and low latency. However, even fibre connections can go down, and in these instances, LTE serves as a common failover option. While LTE can keep businesses connected, it presents a significant issue: it lacks the bandwidth and low latency of fibre, making it difficult to support the same level of activity. When a company relies on LTE for failover, inefficient bandwidth use can result in slow performance, hampering business-critical functions.

The solution? Prioritising essential applications and limiting access to bandwidth-hungry services, such as social media, which may be important for employee engagement but aren’t necessary for core business operations during a failover. Fusion’s Illuminate is a tool specifically designed to help businesses handle this situation, allowing companies to measure bandwidth usage and selectively restrict non-essential applications, ensuring that the LTE failover connection remains effective, instead of feeling like “walking through treacle.”

Why LTE Bandwidth Limitations Pose a Problem

Fibre connections often provide speeds in the hundreds of Mbps, enabling smooth performance for everything from large data transfers to high-quality video conferencing. LTE, on the other hand, is typically much slower, with speeds that can vary significantly depending on location, network congestion, and signal strength. As a result, businesses can experience drastic slowdowns when relying on LTE.

Latency, or the time it takes for data to travel between its source and destination, is another issue with LTE failover. Fibre offers low latency, which is essential for real-time applications like voice over IP (VoIP) and video calls. LTE, however, usually has higher latency, which can lead to delays and degraded quality in these applications. For businesses, this can mean dropped calls, lagging video conferences, and frustration among employees and clients alike.

With these challenges in mind, businesses need a strategy for managing bandwidth when their network falls back to LTE. This is especially crucial if LTE is the only available failover option, which is often the case for businesses located in areas where other backup solutions, like secondary fibre lines or fixed wireless, aren’t feasible.

The Problem with Social Media During Failover

In many organisations, social media and other non-critical web traffic consume a significant portion of the available bandwidth. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are bandwidth-hungry, demanding high download speeds to load images and videos quickly. While these platforms are popular and can contribute to brand-building and employee engagement, they aren’t business-critical during an internet outage. Allowing social media usage over an LTE failover connection can quickly drain available bandwidth, leaving too little for business-critical applications.

Essential applications such as cloud-based productivity suites, customer management systems, email, and VoIP can function on LTE if the available bandwidth isn’t bogged down by non-essential traffic. However, if these applications have to compete with social media traffic, users may experience sluggish load times, delayed responses, and poor overall service quality.

Solving the Failover Bandwidth Problem with Fusion’s Illuminate

Fusion’s Illuminate is an ideal tool to address this challenge, offering insights into bandwidth usage and empowering businesses to optimise their LTE failover connections. Here’s how it works:

1. Highlighting Bandwidth Use
   Illuminate provides real-time visibility into network usage, allowing businesses to identify which applications are consuming the most bandwidth. By categorising traffic, Illuminate can help companies see how much data social media is using compared to business-critical applications. This makes it easy to determine whether non-essential traffic is putting strain on the LTE failover connection.

2. Blocking Non-Essential Applications
   In a failover situation, businesses can use Illuminate to selectively block or restrict bandwidth-hungry applications, prioritising only business-critical applications. By limiting or blocking social media, for example, businesses ensure that vital applications have enough bandwidth to function efficiently over the LTE connection. This way, essential functions like customer communication, cloud services, and online transactions are protected from slowdowns.

3. Setting Automated Policies for Failover Events
   With Illuminate, businesses can create automated policies that activate when the failover connection kicks in. These policies can restrict access to specific sites, reduce the priority of certain applications, or adjust bandwidth limits. Automated policies ensure that as soon as failover is triggered, bandwidth is instantly optimised for essential applications, keeping the business running smoothly without manual intervention.

4. Monitoring and Adjusting in Real Time
   Illuminate’s real-time analytics allow IT teams to monitor the network continuously, adjusting policies as needed. This way, if certain applications unexpectedly consume excessive bandwidth or if additional bandwidth is required for a business-critical function, adjustments can be made in real time to allocate resources effectively.

Why Effective Failover Management Matters

An effective failover strategy isn’t just about keeping the lights on during an outage—it’s about ensuring that the business remains functional, responsive, and professional. Without a clear plan for managing bandwidth on LTE failover, employees and clients can face frustrating slowdowns, harming productivity and potentially damaging client relationships. By using a solution like Fusion’s Illuminate to control non-essential traffic, businesses can:

• Ensure Continuity of Critical Operations
  When LTE is freed from non-essential demands, it’s more capable of supporting cloud applications, communication tools, and other business-critical functions. Employees can stay productive, customers can access services without interruption, and business can continue as usual.

• Minimise Employee Frustration
  Nothing derails productivity faster than slow or unreliable internet, especially during critical times. By prioritising bandwidth for essential functions, businesses reduce the frustration that employees experience when internet speeds drop during failover.

• Maintain Professional Standards in Client Interactions
  Whether it’s a video call with a client, a time-sensitive email, or a system update, poor performance over an LTE failover can leave a lasting negative impression. By optimising LTE usage, businesses can maintain the quality and professionalism of client interactions, even during outages.

Wrap | Turning LTE Failover into a Viable Solution

While LTE may never fully match the performance of fibre, it can still be a valuable failover solution when optimised correctly. Fusion’s Illuminate allows businesses to harness the best of what LTE can offer by prioritising essential applications and blocking bandwidth-heavy, non-critical traffic like social media. This approach transforms LTE from a frustrating fallback into a workable solution, keeping businesses operational and maintaining a high standard of performance even when fibre isn’t available.

By adopting a bandwidth management strategy that prioritises critical applications, businesses not only maximise their LTE connection’s effectiveness but also ensure that their networks are prepared to handle unexpected outages smoothly. With Fusion’s Illuminate, LTE can be more than just a backup—it can be a bridge to seamless business continuity.

---

Ronald Bartels ensures that Internet inhabiting things are connected reliably online at Fusion Broadband South Africa - the leading specialized SD-WAN Last Mile provider in South Africa. Learn more about the best SD-WAN in the world: 👉Contact Fusion✈️

---