Phones for your team, and a backup line for when the office one fails
Business mobile puts your team’s phones on one bill, managed by the people who already run the rest of your IT. 4G/5G failover is a different job entirely – a backup connection that keeps your office online the moment the main line drops, whether or not anyone’s there to notice.
This page covers both, kept separate, so you can find the one you actually came for.
Business mobile: one team, one bill, one call
Most businesses end up running their mobiles and their IT as two completely separate relationships – a mobile provider for the phones, an IT provider for everything else, and no reason for the two to ever talk to each other. When someone joins or leaves the business, that means two calls instead of one, and two different companies who each know only half the picture.
Putting your team’s mobiles on the same account as your IT changes that. One bill covers the connections your team carries, rather than a pile of individual mobile invoices nobody quite owns. One point of contact handles a new starter’s phone the same way they’d handle a new starter’s laptop and email – as part of the same onboarding, not a separate errand.
It also means a leaver’s SIM gets switched off by the same request that switches off everything else they had access to, on the same day, without someone remembering three weeks later that the mobile account was never mentioned. That’s the real change: not a different phone, but one relationship instead of two, with the people managing it already knowing your business rather than starting from a support script.
We don’t sell mobile as an add-on nobody asked for. If your team’s phones are working fine with your current provider, we’ll say so. Where it’s genuinely simpler to bring them under the same roof as the rest of your IT, that’s the conversation worth having.
4G/5G failover: the backup that keeps you online
This is a different problem, and it deserves its own answer rather than a line tacked onto the mobile section above.
Today, if your main internet connection goes down, it takes everything with it. Card payments stop. Calls on a hosted phone system drop mid-conversation. Cloud apps – email, accounting, your booking system, whatever the business actually runs on – go dark, and your team is left checking a router light instead of working. Nobody chose for the whole business to depend on one connection, but for most businesses, that’s exactly what’s happened.
4G/5G failover changes what that moment looks like. A backup cellular connection sits alongside your main line, ready and waiting, and when the main connection drops, your systems move onto it rather than stopping. That’s the important part: it switches over rather than needing somebody to notice, find a dongle, and get it plugged in and configured before anything starts working again. The business keeps running through the outage instead of pausing until someone gets to a cupboard.
The stakes are real enough to be plain about. The average cost of an IT interruption to a UK business runs to £3,500 an hour – and that’s before you count a missed call that goes to a competitor instead, or a client who assumes you’ve closed for the day. Failover doesn’t stop your main connection from failing. It stops that failure from costing you the hour it takes to fix.
Who needs failover most
Not every business needs a backup route, and we won’t tell you that you do if a short outage is genuinely just an inconvenience. But for some businesses, a dropped connection isn’t an inconvenience – it’s the business stopping.
If your phone system runs over the internet rather than a copper line, a dropped connection takes your calls with it, not just your browsing. Our phone systems page covers what that move looks like and why the connection underneath it matters.
If you take card payments, a connection that’s down is a till that’s down, whatever else is working in the shop or office around it. And if your team can’t work offline – no local files to fall back on, everything sitting in the cloud – then a dropped connection doesn’t slow the day down, it stops it.
Where the stakes are highest and the budget allows it, a leased line with its own guarantees is worth weighing up alongside failover rather than instead of it – they solve different parts of the same problem, and we’ll help you work out which one, or both, your business actually needs.
Common questions
Can we put our team's mobiles on the same contract as our IT support?
Yes – that’s the point of bringing the two together. One bill, one point of contact, and starter and leaver changes handled through the same request as the rest of their IT, rather than a separate call to a separate provider.
Do we have to move every phone across at once?
No. Most businesses bring mobiles across gradually as contracts come up for renewal, rather than switching everyone on the same day. We’ll work out a sensible order with you rather than insisting on a single cutover.
How does 4G/5G failover actually switch over - do we have to do anything?
No. The backup connection sits ready alongside your main line, and when the main line drops, your systems move onto it automatically. Nobody has to notice the outage and take action before it starts working – that’s the whole point of having it in place beforehand.
Is failover the same thing as a leased line?
No, and they solve different problems. A leased line is a dedicated primary connection with guaranteed speed and a fix-time commitment. Failover is a backup route that only earns its keep when the main connection – leased line or broadband – goes down. Plenty of businesses that already have a leased line still want failover behind it, because even a good primary connection can fail.
We don't take card payments and our team can work from paper if they have to - do we still need failover?
Possibly not. If a short outage is a genuine inconvenience rather than lost trade, standard broadband with a decent provider may be enough, and we’ll say so rather than selling you a backup route you don’t need. It’s worth a proper conversation either way, because “we could manage without it” and “we have, more than once” are different answers.
Will our mobile numbers change if we move provider?
No. Mobile numbers port across from your existing provider in the same way landline numbers do, and we handle the process rather than leaving you to chase it yourself.
Get your mobiles and your failover sorted
Whether you’re after one bill for your team’s phones, a backup route for the moment your main connection drops, or both, it starts with the same conversation.
Call us on 01202 237 273 and we’ll talk through what you’re running now, or book a free connectivity assessment and we’ll tell you plainly what you actually need.
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