Beyond simply saving large sums of money, SIP is also a great disaster recovery / business continuity solution. Up until now, we have just had to accept the fact that we can’t build any sort of reasonable amount of redundancy into our phone services. The proper deployment of an IP phone system and SIP trunking providers has changed that and Inflow has been leading that charge for over three years now!
Our Portland, OR and Northwest-based customers love us. Every Allworx / ShoreTel phone solution that we propose for our customers has a full disaster recovery component to it.
Unlike traditional wire-line technologies like analog and PRI, VOIP / SIP trunking providers provide dial tone over an IP connection(s). Because of that, a whole new world of dial tone redundancy is available to the organization. Currently, if your PRI gets severed by the all-mighty back hoe, your options are pretty much limited to waiting for the Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) to restore your service. In the meantime, you’re sitting without the lifeblood to your business – your telephones!
With the proper SIP providers, we can deliver dial tone over one connection (T1, fiber optics, etc). If that connection to the world fails, we can automatically fail over to an alternate IP connection (cable, DSL, etc). This is all made possible because SIP trunks are merely packets containing voice, traversing the network. Like a standard Internet connection, we can re-route those packets over an alternate connection and re-establish communications with the SIP trunking provider. Since when could we provide 100% dial-tone fail-over with traditional analog lines or PRIs?
Often, we recommend our customers use two different connections with different physical mediums (copper vs. fiber optics, coax vs. copper) to facilitate (1) their primary Internet connection and (2) their primary voice (SIP VOIP) connection. With the proper network configuration, we can enable these connections to BACK EACH OTHER UP. How’s that for an SLA?
In theory it’s simple. However, Inflow Communications has been perfecting the manner in which it’s done with a unique solution that combines SIP trunks, a business phone system (preferably an IP phone system), and adjunct SIP / networking technology. It works, we have many happy customers whom have benefited from it (and they’re happy to talk to you).
Oh yeah, you can load balance and fail SIP across physical locations too….
Oh yeah, if both IP connections go away, we can automatically fail to copper POTS line…
