Can VoIP Be As Reliable As Traditional Phone Service?

By: Avad Technologies | Posted: 02nd February 2012

Yes it can, but that costs extra.
Certain businesses and government agencies that support critical infrastructure require their phone systems to be functional 100% of the time. Examples
include the military, police, fire and hospitals. When failure is not an option, then you must have redundancy in the event your primary system
fails.

Sky diving is an example of an activity where failure is not an option. Sky divers always carry a reserve shoot in case their primary shoot fails. The cost of adding a second parachute adds to the cost of sky diving. The same principal applies when adding redundancy to pbx hosted solutions.

Watch Out For the Bogus Performance Guarantee

While VoIP technology has become very stable over the past several years, no technology is 100% reliable. If your company requires 100% reliability, then you must build redundancy into your system.

You cannot expect the provider of any service, including business VoIP services to guarantee 100% reliability. While the provider of a service publicly states they offer a 100% guarantee, to find out exactly what that means, you must read the fine print. In companies that provide a service like, like Business VoIP phone service, this is known as the Service Level Agreement (SLA), often tells a different story.

Most SLA’s have a “Damages” clause which is where the company limits its damages in the envent of a service outage. In the event of an outage, regardless of how “damaging” financially it is to your company, the most you can expect to recover is a percentage of your monthly bill. That is a bogus guarantee and one that you should not rely on.

How do you get 100% uptime on your phone system?

The answer is actually fairly simple. In order to guarantee 100% uptime of your phone system, or for any system, you need two completely independent fully
functioning systems in place.

An example of this type of redundancy is a back up generator at a hospital. It is unacceptable for people to die if the facility looses power and that is why hospitals always have redundant power supplies.

Situations like these require an 100% redundancy. How much redundancy your company needs depends on the damage an outage could cause. The economic harm of an outage is affected by the frequency and duration of an outage.

What is your tolerance for phone system outages?

Before you spend money building redundancy into your system, you should determine the economic cost of an outage. The amount of redundancy your company requires depends on the answers to the following questions;

1. Is any outage time acceptable?

2. How long of an outage can you withstand before the damage to your company becomes unacceptable?

3. How much are you willing to pay to guarantee against each outage type?

4. Are some types of outages unacceptable?

5. Are you willing to live with the occasional system wide outage that lasts for a hour or less or occasional call quality issues?

Redundancy is a trade off, most of the time

There are different ways of achieving redundancy on a business VoIP solutions. Complete, 100% guaranteed redundancy requires 2 of everything and costs roughly twice as much as your current phone bill. Other types of redundancy cost less to
achieve.

Before building redundancy into your system, determine how much and what types of phone system outages your company can accept and then figure out how much it costs to implement. In some fields 100% redundancy is a must, Sky Diving is one that comes to mind.

AVAD Technologies is a leading business VoIP providers in USA. With its cutting edge line of integrated voice/data solutions, AVAD Technologies provides complete contact center software solutions to cost-conscious,results-driven, value-oriented organizations. Avad Technologies offers business VoIP solutions, VoIP Services, call centers solution, and business VoIP phone system and large enterprise customers.

If you would like to learn more about how AVAD Technologies can help your company convert to a Business VoIP Phone Service services, please call (800) 733-4136 to speak with a Business VoIP Specialist or you can complete a short VoIP Quote Request Form.

Check out also for Call centers solution and VoIP call center
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Tags: reliability, uptime, different story, damages, redundancy, parachute, hospitals, government agencies, phone service, sky diving