When a major carrier outage knocked out internet across parts of Toronto in September of 2025, a busy medical centre in Scarborough continued running (including phones, EMR, and patient check-ins) thanks to Fidalia’s IP-preserving OnePort™ backup internet service. No downtime. No disruption. No lost appointments.
Background: A High-Traffic Family Practice in Scarborough
A year earlier, Erin called us to discuss an issue they were having with their internet connectivity: It was often unreliable and first thing in the mornings, it was too slow for the staff setting up the clinic. The network had to support two dozen staff and upwards of 250 patient visits every day. Slow and unreliable were not acceptable.
Erin is the Managing Director of a large family medical clinic on Eglinton Ave East in North Scarborough that services walk-in patients, family practices, and specialists relies heavily on their systems to support their business.
- Their VoIP-based phone systems for appointment bookings and triage
- A cloud-hosted EMR (Electronic Medical Record) platform
- Secure VPN connections to the Scarborough Hospital Network (SHN)
- Internet-connected printers and payment systems
- Online booking and prescription renewal systems
It was evident to Fidalia that the clinic needed more robust connectivity. As such, we installed OnePort™ – Fidalia’s managed sub-second failover service – utilizing a new fibre connection and treating the existing cable connection as the backup.
The Incident: An ISP Outage Hits During Mid-Morning Rush
At 10:48 AM on a Tuesday in September, the clinic’s primary internet connection (the shared fibre circuit) dropped due to a major upstream routing failure affecting dozens of businesses across the GTA.
Before OnePort™:
Single-connection networks are designed to handle traffic, but aren’t designed to support mission-critical services like patient-care applications and clinic phone systems. An outage to a single-connection network would have caused the phones to fail, VPNs to disconnect, the EMR would become unreachable and, ultimately, patient traffic would bottleneck at reception.
The OnePort™ Outcome: Zero Disruption
Instead, thanks to OnePort™ from Fidalia Networks, the failover process looked like this:
- the backup internet link activated automatically
- The clinic’s public IP remained unchanged
- Staff continued accessing EMR as normal
- VoIP phones stayed registered. (All calls continued)
- POS and health card systems operated without issue
- VPNs didn’t have to reconnect
The switchover between internet connections happened in under 1 second. Clinic staff didn’t even realize a failover had occurred until Fidalia’s tech team notified them later.
“The internet never went down for us. It was the first time we didn’t get swarmed with complaints when something broke.”
— Erin, Clinic’s Managing Director
Why Fidalia’s OnePort™ Backup Internet Was Critical
Key success factors:
- Static IP continuity: The EMR system and VoIP phones rely on trusted IP access. With Fidalia, no session dropped.
- Pre-configured failover: No staff intervention, no reboots.
- Proactive monitoring: The outage was detected and logged by Fidalia’s NOC in real time.
- Path diversity: The clinic stayed online using an autonomous backup connection
The OnePort system is able to detect outages and flip traffic from one connection to the next with no impact to patient-care applications or to clinic operations. In this case, both of the connections were wired connections (GPON Fibre as primary and Cable Internet as backup), but OnePort works with 4G and 5G connections as well. There is no reason for an active clinic to be off-line.
The Business Impact of Downtime
| Metric | Without Backup | With OnePort™ |
|---|---|---|
| Phone system uptime | 0% – Calls would have dropped. | 100% |
| Patient visits affected | ~75+ | 0 |
| Manual check-ins needed | Yes | No |
| Downtime cost estimate | $3,000–$4,500 | $0 |
Aside from the quantifiable effects of downtime, the clinic touts Fidalia’s OnePort for its ability to support the operations of the clinic. Patients and staff were unaware of the outage affecting other offices on the floor.
Lessons for Clinics & Healthcare Providers
Medical practices face unique risks. The majority of patients aren’t, in many cases, able to wait for technology to reboot or restart. “They’re not visiting us because they want to,” adds Erin. “They have a concern and they are trusting us to deal with it. If our systems aren’t down, the clinic might as well close its door for the day. Our staff are trained on patient care, not IT systems. That the OnePort service does its job, it means our staff can do theirs – and everyone’s happy.”
Fidalia’s OnePort™ backup internet service keeps healthcare teams focused on care, not connectivity.
The Future for the Clinic
The clinic has had zero outages since installing the OnePort service – a reality that seemed impossible only months earlier. They plan now to remove their existing analog phone system to replace it with Fidalia’s VoIP Phone System to allow their staff more flexibility with calls, text messaging clients, and call handling flows.
Ready to Protect Your Clinic from Outages?
Fidalia offers SmartSwitch™ and UltraSwitch™ backup internet service options tailored for medical offices, clinics, and regulated healthcare environments. OnePort is offered as part of Fidalia’s Healthcare Solution – a turn key solution that delivers the systems necessary for clinics to provide the best quality care for patients.
Book a consultation to assess your risk and coverage.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can LTE support a full clinic’s failover?
It depends, really. Typical LTE bandwidth taps out at approximately 40mbps. And if you’re using that much bandwidth, you’ll blow through 50GB of traffic in 2.5 hours. So it’s not ideal to use an LTE connection as a backup for larger, bandwidth-needy clinics. Most clinics at ~30 staff can deal with 5mbps of bandwidth over the backup connection, which makes either DSL or LTE a very suitable backup connection. We can right-size your backup connection based on your bandwidth requirements and cost factors. Just ask.
Will phones and EMRs stay online during failover?
Yes. The OnePort™ UltraSwitch service maintains the user’s IP address so that sessions don’t “break” – and that includes phone calls and EMR sessions. With OnePort™, your backup internet is bulletproof.
Is OnePort™ backup internet compliant with PIPEDA and other regulations?
Absolutely. We help clinics maintain uptime required for compliance, with encrypted tunnels and audit-friendly uptime reporting. Read this article for more information about compliance and backup internet.
What’s the typical deployment time?
Most clinics are up and running in under 2 weeks, including equipment configuration and testing. The clinic referenced in the case study above was online with the backup internet solution in under 5 business days.