How You Can Guarantee Reliable VoIP Service
Reliable VoIP service – that’s what you want for your business. You have good phones, but what if the Internet goes down?
Choosing VoIP telephone service and a cloud-hosted PBX service can bring you, the entrepreneur, office manager or IT director, peace of mind. At your site, there’s only a router and telephones.
Your remote staff use soft phones to connect from their home offices. Your VoIP service provider hosts your cloud PBX, and routes all your international toll free numbers and vanity toll fee numbers to your hosted PBX.
As outlined in an earlier article here, 3 Tips for Using Business VoIP, you can seemingly have it all under control. A stable Internet connection, a hosted PBX, and a reliable VoIP service provider. Sounds perfect! What could go wrong?
Well, as outlined in a new article from Don Sadler Software Advice’s Hello Operator, 3 Ways to Keep Your VoIP Service From Going Down With the Internet, there’s always the possibility of Internet failure.
With loss of Internet connectivity from your office or remote location, your inbound and outbound phone calls could stop, and you’d have no immediate connection to your cloud hosted PBX. This could paralyze the unprepared business.
Ensure Reliable VoIP Service by Preparing for Internet Failure
Fortunately, Don Sadler’s article points out many useful preparations you can make to enjoy reliable VoIP service. Here are the key points:
- Choose a system with built-in redundancy and call continuity – This includes the capability to automatically forward calls to other phone numbers if service fails, including mobile devices.
- Use a Backup or Alternate Internet Service Provider – Use broadband service from two different providers for your premises. Admittedly this can be a little more expensive, but having a diversity routing solution is the gold standard in connectivity-dependent businesses like hotel and airline reservations, media, emergency services, customer service, and online gaming, as examples.
- Have a backup connection to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) – Sadler suggests bringing a PSTN connection into your building (as in into your wiring closet where it would traditionally terminate. This would enable you to bring up backup phone service on an expedited basis, perhaps even in the event of a cable cut affecting just your broadband. The idea of having a PSTN connection as a backup is a tried and true solution, but you may be able to have this included in your service from the VoIP service provider. In particular, top-tier toll free number and hosted PBX service providers are often able to provide SIP to SIP, SIP to PSTN, and PSTN to PSTN failover.
The Hello Operator article is an interesting article and worth clipping for your VoIP service collection. If you haven’t moved to VoIP yet, you’re literally missing out. Don Sadler concisely summarizes this way:
If you’ve been considering switching your business telephone service to VoIP but have hesitated because of concerns about losing phone service due to Internet failure, this concern should not keep you from making the switch. By implementing one of these three strategies, you can ensure uninterrupted telephone service for your business—and reap the many potential benefits that VoIP has to offer.
About Hello Operator and Don Sadler
Hello Operator is a business telephony technology blog channel hosted by SoftwareAdvice.com. SoftwareAdvice.com is a provider of advice and reviews intended to help businesses select the software solutions most appropriate for the business needs of each buyer.
Don Sadler is a long-time telecommunications professional with 30 years experience with a major international carrier in large business and government accounts and regulatory affairs. He’s written about VoIP and hosted PBX service for business.
About CallForwarding.com Service Continuity
Callforwarding.com’s VoIP toll free numbers are provisioned using multiple Tier 1 telecommunications carriers providing redundant Internet routing and telephone connections worldwide. Our failover routing capability enables us to reroute your calls through another carrier to your selected IP address or phone number. This includes SIP to SIP, SIP to PSTN, and PSTN to PSTN failover.