Net Dependence And SPOF

My connectivity has been up and down like a crazy monkey this morning, so hopefully I'll be able to actually get this entry written before I'm dropped on LOST Island once again. I've worked from home for years (and before then was heavily Net addicted), making my connectivity critically important, but since adding VoIP never more so.

Comcast added their own VoIP service maybe a year ago and their price incentive made it attractive. Work has recently signed on with SpeakEasy to provide VoIP business voice service, and the accompanying Linksys phone set currently sits with its attractively backlight display on my desk.

But none of that's worth a packet when your connectivity is down.

You'd think that the several long power outages we've endured lately would have produced the same wonderings in my head about whether anybody would see my smoke signals, but all of those outages were just power, and the VoIP cable modem contains a decent battery, so we've still been able to make calls. This morning, though, no data signal. Bad blinky lights on the modem's display, winking like a twitching short circuited droid. And worst of all, pickup up the phone and getting silence instead of the reassuring mantra of a dial tone.

So my connection is a big single point of failure, and I hate those. Sure, I live with others, but they all have partial redundancies: there's the microwave to the gas stove, the wood stove to the oil furnace, and while lousy there's the fireplace for both. So I guess I need a prepaid cell modem, preferably one I could hang off of my router and only use (and have to shell money out for) when I need it. Know of any company that offers one?