What happens if my fibre connection is affected by load shedding?

Fibre itself, the physical glass cable, doesn't care about load shedding; light doesn't need electricity to travel through glass. What does need power is every piece of active equipment along the path: your router at your premises, the ONT (the small box converting light signals to a usable network connection), and critically, the ISP's network equipment and exchange points along the route.

Where the Vulnerability Actually Sits

There are three separate points where power loss can take your fibre offline:

• Your own premises equipment, the ONT and router at your site lose power the moment your specific area's load shedding stage hits
• Your ISP's local exchange or POP, if the fibre network operator's equipment in your area isn't on generator or adequately battery-backed, the fault sits upstream of your control entirely
• Backbone infrastructure, less commonly affected since major fibre operators generally run generator backup at core sites, but not guaranteed at every distribution point

What You Can Actually Control

You can't fix your ISP's exchange power resilience, but you can fully control your own site: a properly sized UPS on your router and ONT keeps your equipment powered through a load shedding window even if the fibre signal itself remains live. For most SME setups, a UPS covering just the network core (router, ONT, switch) rather than the whole office draws far less power and can realistically bridge a 2 to 4 hour load shedding stage.

The Real-World Pattern We See

In practice, the most common failure mode isn't the fibre line itself, it's the customer's own router and ONT losing power at their exact site. This is precisely why UPS backup on network equipment is one of the highest-value, lowest-cost resilience investments a business can make, it's a fraction of the cost of full-office backup power but protects the thing that actually keeps you connected to the outside world.

Adding True Redundancy

For businesses where any downtime is genuinely costly, VoIP calls dropping, card payments failing, cloud applications becoming unreachable, the more complete answer is automatic LTE/5G failover alongside fibre. If your fibre link genuinely goes down (whether from load shedding upstream or a physical fault), a properly configured dual-WAN router switches to the SIM-based backup within seconds, often without anyone in the office noticing.

Our Recommendation

We size UPS backup for your specific network core equipment as standard practice on any connectivity install, and we'll walk you through whether automatic failover makes sense given your actual load shedding schedule and business risk. A retail store taking card payments has a very different risk profile to a back-office admin team, and the resilience investment should match that.