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Waking up to find your internet is not working can be very disorienting.

If it’s your home broadband, it could mean your daily routine is scuppered immediately, impacting your work, the things you watch or listen to, and even potentially your doorbell or lights.

Without access to the internet, your phone can go from vital to useless.Credit: Getty

If it’s your mobile network, you might find yourself cut off whenever you’re away from Wi-Fi, with many of the tools you rely on — maps, calendars, search, social media — inaccessible on the go. Not to mention the potential loss of calls and messaging.

If you lose both, as was the case on Wednesday for anyone who had their home and mobile through Optus, you could find yourself completely shut out, technologically.

While there’s no way to prevent outages entirely — the networks are so phenomenally complex that constant minor outages and the occasional worst-case scenario like this week are inevitable — we can take proactive steps to avoid some of the impact.

Prepare an e-SIM

The e-SIM is one of the greatest – yet least understood – mobile phone innovations of the last decade. Essentially, it’s a SIM card that lives inside your phone and can be programmed on the fly with a new phone number and data account. It works the same as a traditional SIM, except instead of having to go to the shops or wait for a package in the mail, you can use a telco’s app to set it up instantly.

If you’re using a physical SIM that suddenly isn’t providing data access or mobile coverage due to an outage, you should be able to sign up with a different provider via e-SIM in a matter of minutes. But you will need access to the internet to do that, so a smarter play might be to organise your e-SIM in advance and have it to rely on when you need it. Just make sure the provider you go with uses a different network (Telstra, Optus or Vodafone) than your regular provider.

Most phones with e-SIMs let you have it and a physical SIM card configured at the same time. You can switch between them in the settings, so it’s you can choose which to use as your main account and which one to use in an emergency. If your phone doesn’t support e-SIM, the same advice applies – it’s just more fiddly to buy and activate a second physical SIM, and then hide it in a safe place in case of emergency.

Buy a portable Wi-Fi

Telstra or Optus branded pocket Wi-Fi modems are cheaper, but only work with SIMs on those networks.

Some telco-provided home routers have a SIM backup and will automatically switch to mobile data if your home broadband goes down. This is an effective contingency in almost all cases – the obvious exception being a significant outage like the one that just hit Optus, which took both fixed and wireless networks.

A portable Wi-Fi hotspot (also called a pocket Wi-Fi modem) is a gadget that can help you out here, and can also be a valuable thing to have for outages of all kinds. You can get one for around $50, but you can also pay extra for faster speeds, more capacity (so connecting to more devices at once) and bigger batteries. A high-end 5G model will go for at least $500. Or you can get one on a plan from big telcos, which could be worthwhile if you plan to use it often, for example for laptop internet on the go.

Once you have the device, you insert a SIM card, keep it charged up, and when needed it can connect to mobile data networks and provide a Wi-Fi network.

It’s just like the hotspot you might activate on your phone when your home internet is down, except the standalone gadget has the advantage of not draining your phone’s battery, using a separate data account, and being able to provide internet to your smartphone on the go if your mobile provider conks out. As above, just make sure the SIM you get for the hotspot uses a different network to your main provider.

Diversify your tech

The obvious downside to both of these solutions is that, one way or another, you will have to pay for a second mobile account.

You could get a cheap monthly prepaid plan and treat it as an extra data allowance plus an outage backup, or you could spend $100 or so on a long expiry plan that lasts the whole year and then just forget about it until there’s an emergency.

For a less expensive solution, you could just make sure you have multiple options for work, entertainment, and contacting people.

Maybe set up an emergency stash with a landline phone, DVDs or a hard drive of video and music files for the laptop.

Consider using different telcos for your internet and mobile, and make sure important people are contactable by phone, text and a data service like WhatsApp.

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