What Happens to Your VoIP Telephony Solution When Your Internet is Down?
IP Telephony, or VoIP, requires, as you know, an Internet connection. So, you may be wondering what happens when your Internet is down? Are you still receiving your calls? In this article, we discus business continuity plans available to organizations in such situations.
Voice Communications Are Strategic
As with most organizations, phone conversations are at the heart of business communications. Whether it is the sales order desk or the customer service department, it is of the utmost importance to answer calls to provide an exceptional experience that customers expect today. For a retail store, not to answer calls may indicate to your customers that the store is closed – and you may lose important sales. We all know it: voice communications are strategic.
Partial Solutions
Some IP telephony service providers propose doubling the main Internet connection with a secondary link from the same provider; for example, backing a coax connection with another one. This obviously is an inadequate solution should an issue occur with your cable operator.
Other IP telephony providers offer to use a secondary link from an alternate technology carrier; for example, by providing a coax cable with a secondary FTTN connection. Although this solves the carrier or technology issue, it does not solve the issue that all cables are attached to the same post or go through the same conduit nearby. If this post or conduit is damaged by an unforeseen event (think construction accident) or is rendered unusable due to weather conditions (think ice storm!), you are still left without an Internet connection.
You must also take into account that some VoIP providers may be hit by outages in their core network.
The IP4B Business Continuity Plan
IP4B is dedicated to providing an extremely robust IP telephony network. In order to mitigate possible Internet connectivity issues, it has put forth the following measures.
Standard with every hosted IP telephony package, IP4B offers the non-reachable call forward function. When a physical phone set loses its Internet connection, and is thus non-reachable, the phone’s extension is programmed within IP4B’s servers in its data centers to automatically forward calls to another number, for example the user’s mobile number. In this way, should you lose Internet connectivity, your organization will not miss a single call. This is virtually impossible with traditional premise-based IP phone systems.
For businesses, Internet is obviously not just for IP telephony. It is to address this need that, in 2016, IP4B launched its LTE wireless Internet back-up service. Should the primary Internet connection be unavailable, the LTE connection automatically takes over allowing organizations to operate uninterruptedly by having access to essential IT services.
With the LTE service, businesses keep receiving voice calls and continue having access to cloud-based hosted applications like credit card payment systems or point-of-sale (POS) applications. In other words, you are good to continue doing business as usual.
Conclusion
A lot has been said in this article about redundant Internet connectivity to your business location. It is also super important to consider the efforts that your service provider is doing to provide redundancy from its data centers to the rest of the Internet world. IP4B devotes enormous efforts and resources to provide telco grade services. Both of its data centers are connected by redundant fiber optics from different national providers. Should one go down, all traffic would be routed to the alternate carrier. And if one data center should have issues, all communications would be taken over the other one. This message of robustness has been repeated over and over here, and here.
In closing, should your organization experience an Internet outage, IP4B has solutions and the business continuity plan to support your IP telephony and IT applications. This is what we call staying connected to your business.
Please contact one of our solutions consultants at sales@ip4b.ca to ensure that your organization has the proper Internet connectivity business continuity plan to support your IP telephony and IT applications.