Car dealerships close deals every day. They depend on their networks to process sales, manage inventory, run credit reports, and handle other business transactions to close those deals. But what happens if a customer is ready to buy and the network is down?

Chuck Roden, CEO of Complete Computer Systems, was excited about the trucks he planned to purchase from the Birmingham, Alabama branch of Rountree Automotive, a regional car dealership with centers in six southeastern states. Unfortunately, instead of driving home in one of his new vehicles on the day he expected, Roden had to wait. Rountree’s network was down that day and there was no backup system to process the transaction.

The next day, Roden, who happens to be a dealer for Hughes, introduced Rountree to the idea of a managed service that provides automatic fail-over to a broadband satellite connection in the event of primary terrestrial network failure. HughesNet Access Continuity Service protects enterprises from costly downtime caused by connectivity outages by delivering a dependable, alternate transport path.

“We knew we needed a backup solution,” said Lester Edwards, information systems manager of Rountree Automotive. “During Hurricane Katrina, our Mobile, Alabama store went down for 45 days. When a network goes down, we can lose anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 per hour.”

Rountree was sold. The auto dealer installed the HughesNet service, overlaying the broadband satellite solution across its multi-location terrestrial network. According to Edwards, the HughesNet Access Continuity Service saves the company an average of $1,200 to $1,300 per month. “Now that we have it, I don’t know how we survived without automatic fail-over—it’s like waking up in the 22nd century,” said Edwards.

The HughesNet Access Continuity Service has also given Rountree the ability to expand. “With HughesNet, we aren’t dependent on phone lines, so we can cost-effectively add additional stores. All we have to do is purchase the service and our new store is up and running. If we run into any major problems that I cannot handle using the customer support portal, our Hughes support team is just a phone call away,” said Edwards.

 “If our connection to the Internet is down, we can’t carry out basic business functions,” said Edwards. “If we can’t close a deal with a customer because we are down, he will buy somewhere else. HughesNet eliminates this risk as the automatic fail-over feature ensures that if our terrestrial network goes down, we are covered by satellite and will never miss another sales opportunity.”