How long could you cope for without being connected?
As individuals and businesses, we take it for granted that we can always be connected. By and large, that’s a fairly safe assumption – if, that is, you are in an urban area where fibre or copper broadband services are available, alongside decent 4G coverage.
But it’s not so easy for everyone. In smaller towns and villages and in rural and more remote areas, there is certainly no guarantee that you will be able to get good – or any - fixed line connectivity. In almost every country in Europe there will be some zones in which broadband just is not available.
Lack of cover
You can see this if you look at the coverage maps published in the EU’s Special Report on next generation access (NGA) Broadband coverage in member states. While the overall picture (scroll down to the Annex section) is not too bad, if you look at the map for rural areas only, there are vast swathes of major countries, such as France, Spain, Italy and Sweden, where less than 35 percent of households and businesses have access to higher-speed connections of up to 30Mbps.
This data is admittedly from 2016, although the report was only published in the middle of last year (2018), and while the situation may have improved since then, you can be sure that there are still many places in which you just can’t get a decent, or any, broadband. Of course, there are also situations in which attaching to local fibre or copper services is not possible or would be too difficult, time-consuming or expensive. A good example would be a construction site or where it’s just not possible to reach the fixed line connection easily or cost-effectively, such as on public transport vehicles or within stations.
Viable alternative
In all of these situations, an LTE router can be used to provide a quick and simple solution. With the new Zyxel LTE 7240-M403 Outdoor Router, you can get download speeds of up to 150Mbps, so providing there is a decent 4G signal, it will provide very good performance. Data rates for 4G are now very affordable across Europe, so it’s also an entirely viable and cost-effective alternative.
Even where good fixed-line services are available, the LTE 7240-M403 can be very useful for shops, restaurants, cafés and bars that are constantly taking contactless card and pin payments. These types of business can’t afford to lose their connection, even for a few minutes. Not being connected means not being able to do business – and of course, it also means their guest WiFi will be out of action, which won’t be popular with customers.
This is why it’s really important that they have a way of staying connected when their main broadband connection goes down – or becomes so slow that it’s basically unusable. Unfortunately, occasional outages and drops in speed do still happen, so having a failover option is always a good idea.
And of course, the LTE 7240-M403 is also an Outdoor Router that meets the IP56 standards and can thus withstand a reasonably dusty environment and the occasional splash of water, so it can be deployed wherever it is needed, can pick up the best available 4G signal and ensure that business keeps moving.
