Most businesses think of their internet as a service. It is actually a physical thing: a strand of glass or a run of copper that travels from your building to somewhere else, through conduit, along poles, and under streets. And in a metro area as busy as Chicago, with constant construction, road work, and utility projects, that physical path gets disturbed.
When a fiber line is cut, the outage quickly shutdown your business operations, almost in an instant. Unfortunately, your business is offline until someone locates the damage, dispatches a crew, and splices the line back together.
How fiber gets cut
- Dig-ins. Excavation crews hit buried conduit. Chicago has a one-call system (JULIE, reachable by dialing 811) meant to prevent this, but marking errors and missed calls still happen.
- Aerial damage. Overhead lines are exposed to vehicle strikes, falling branches, ice loading, and high wind.
- Road and utility projects. A water main repair a block away can take out a line that was never the target.
- Vandalism and theft. Copper theft and tampering with network equipment cause outages in some areas.
Repairs Often Take Hours, Not Minutes
A cut isn’t fixed when the crew arrives. First, the provider has to detect and locate the break. Then comes dispatch, traffic control at the site, and permits in some cases. Then the splicing itself, which is precise work. During a large event, such as a storm that damages many lines at once, your repair is in a queue with everyone else’s.
The real fix is path diversity
Having two internet providers sounds like redundancy. It only is if they don’t share a failure point. Ask these questions:
- Do both providers enter the building through the same conduit or entrance? If so, one backhoe can take out both.
- Do their upstream routes share the same street, pole line, or river crossing? Providers often lease from the same underlying carrier.
- Are both circuits the same technology? A fiber circuit paired with a cable or fixed wireless or cellular backup fails differently from two fibers.
The strongest setups use physically diverse paths and different technologies, so one event can’t take down both. This is a foundational aspect of disaster recovery planning. Strong IT firms like Infinity Technologies, naturally build these redundancies or provisions throughout the network infrastructure and its segments.
Automatic failover matters as much as the backup
A second circuit that someone has to plug in manually isn’t a backup. A properly configured dual-WAN firewall or SD-WAN device detects a failed link and shifts traffic automatically, often fast enough that staff barely notice. Test it quarterly by pulling the primary connection on purpose during a controlled window. Infinity Technologies is a total package MSP (managed service provider) that will routinely perform these checks and manage cybersecurity threats.
Questions to ask your provider
- Where does my circuit physically run, and is there a second path into my building?
- What is the repair time commitment in my contract, and is it a guarantee or a target?
- Do you proactively monitor my circuit and notify me, or do I find out when staff complain?
If they do not know the answers to these questions, you should look for another provider for reliable internet coverage.
Where we come in
At Infinity Technologies, we help Chicagoland businesses master their technology ecosystem so a single cut doesn’t mean a single point of failure.
Curious what a fiber cut would cost you? Try our free Network Outage Revenue Loss Calculator