New Spanish rules force the big telecom operators to keep mobile coverage running through power cuts. Nobody’s making sure your business stays online.
One afternoon in August, at the busiest hour, the power goes out at a bar on the coast. It’s back in twenty minutes. The air conditioning and the lights recover instantly. The card reader doesn’t: it takes almost half an hour to find a signal again. During that time, nobody can pay by card, and nobody who messaged to book a table gets an answer, because the router is still restarting.
You don’t need a historic blackout like the one Spain had in April 2025 for this to happen. A short technical outage is enough — and those are already common in summer, with the electricity grid running close to its limits. The difference between the two is duration, not the outcome: no power means no connection, and no connection means your business stops, even if the premises are open and the rest of the street already has light back.
The Spanish government has just announced a measure meant to make this happen less often. It’s worth looking closely at exactly who it protects.
What’s actually changing for mobile networks
Before the end of 2026, a royal decree will require operators that bill more than €50 million a year or have more than 500,000 customers — Movistar, Orange, Vodafone, among others — to install batteries at their masts capable of keeping mobile service running for a minimum of four hours during a power cut. The rollout happens in phases: 50% of the population covered in year one, 65% in year two, 75% in year three. The estimated investment for the big operators is around €300 million, and the rule also requires that calls to the emergency number keep going through even if one specific network fails. Telefónica and Cellnex already expanded their agreement in July to install part of those batteries.
The measure comes directly out of the April 2025 blackout, when mobile networks went down across large parts of the country at the same time, leaving people unable to communicate or follow what was happening. It made sense that it came. It came late.
The question nobody asks
What exactly does that battery protect? The mast down the street. Not the router in your premises.
The operator guarantees the signal reaches your front door. But if your router, your switch, your phone system, or your card reader have no power of their own during the cut, that signal has nothing to connect to inside your premises — there’s nothing switched on to receive it. It’s like guaranteeing the motorway stays open without guaranteeing your car has fuel.
The rule doesn’t require anything inside your business, and it wouldn’t make sense if it did — that’s not Movistar’s job. The last stretch, the one that decides whether you keep taking payments, keep answering, or are even reachable during a cut, is still yours, exactly as it was before the decree.
What goes dark first in your business
Follow the sequence, because not everything fails at the same time or for the same reason.
What falls first is whatever shares a plug with the router: the wifi, and with it the card reader if it takes payment wirelessly, the security cameras and alarm if they run over the network, and the phone system if it’s VoIP. What falls next, once each device’s own battery runs out, is any cloud-based system you use for bookings, orders, or appointments — even if the computer you were checking it on still has power of its own.
Twenty years teaches you a few things, and one that keeps repeating is that it’s rarely the big, historic blackout that does the most damage. It’s the forty-minute cut, three or four times a year, that quietly wipes out a whole afternoon’s takings because nobody planned for it.
What you can check this week
Take stock of what depends on power and connection at the same time: router, switch, card reader, phone system, cameras. If it all runs off the same socket, it all goes down together.
Work out what an hour without being able to take payments or answer costs you. Not to scare you — to know what level of investment actually makes sense.
Put a UPS on the router and the switch. It’s the cheapest item on this list and the one that buys you the most runtime per euro spent.
Ask your card reader or phone system provider if there’s an offline mode, or whether it depends on a permanent connection with no exceptions.
The rule that obliges the big operators was well designed and came later than it should have. But it doesn’t change what was already true: whether your business keeps working through a power cut doesn’t depend only on Movistar doing its part. It depends on what you have set up inside your own premises.
Do you know how long your business would stay connected if the power went out right now?
Not to sell you anything. So you know: checking this takes half an hour and usually needs a small investment. If you want to know what your business needs to keep running through the next power cut, get in touch.
