By Dan Baldwin
Our Southern California based multi-location business phone system customers often refer other business owners they know to us who are having the worse time with their phone service because their VoIP phone carrier has a service outage every other month for an hour or even a day which brings their business to a complete stand still.
When we ask about which carrier they use that keeps going down we learn it's either a "no name" provider that's just getting into the VoIP and SIP phone service business or it's one of the big incumbent carriers that are in the process of converting their old "TDM" (time division multiplex AKA old copper phone line) customers over to VoIP and SIP.
How Can VoIP Phone Outages be Eliminated? Ask These 5 Questions...
Start by interviewing IP phone service providers that have never experienced an outage - like BandTel.
During the interview of all prospective business VoIP/SIP/IP phone service providers, ask the following five questions:
1. Can you please show us a diagram of your existing IP phone network identifying any single points of future failure?
2. How has your IP network changed since it's inception & how many outages have you experienced?
3. How does your network redundancy design and failure rate compare to your three closest competitors?
4. Speaking only in terms of network outage prevention, why is your network significantly better than your competitor's networks?
5. If we experience a working hours outage of more than 30 minutes can we get out of our agreement?
If you can't get direct, understandable answers to these questions then you're not speaking with an IP phone provider that's worried enough about your business.
We Don't See Our Customers as "VoIP Lab Rats"
The existing incumbent local phone companies are not switching their business customers to VoIP, SIP and other IP phone service technologies because they want their customers to have a "fantastic new business phone experience".
They're switching their existing customers to IP because it's cheaper for them to maintain a switched IP phone network with "soft switches" than to keep upgrading and maintaining their older (and generally more reliable) existing TDM phone network infrastructure.
Many of these carriers will send out only the smallest notice suggesting how, "Because we love our customers so much we're upgrading the network - at no expense to you!"
What they should be broadcasting is a more honest message like, "Hold on to your seats my unfortunate lab rat customers, this is going to be a very bumpy ride and not all of you are going to survive!"
What Do You Need to Do to Prevent Phone Service Outages in Your Business?
We'll educate you about which carriers understand how to prevent customer phone outages like BandTel and which ones are just "ramming their customers into VoIP" without care.
Click here to listen to BandTel's Chief Technology Officer Peter Sandstrom describe how they've designed BandTel's IP network to never go down - which it never has going back five years. You can hear the detailed description at the 2 min: 30 sec point in the interview.
Click here to view a BandTel's network architecture document.
The old phone lines days are gone. You're going to be a VoIP/SIP/IP business phone customer (if you're not already) whether you want to be or not.
Let's talk about getting VoIP right the first time - or the next time. Let's talk about whether BandTel's right for your company's phone future.
Give us a call!
Looking for a Southern California based, vendor neutral business communications technology service expert that can help you out with your multi-location telecom or data network problems?
Click here to learn about how we might be able to fix your problem for free, then contact me directly at 951-251-5155 or [email protected].
BaldwinTel helps multi-location businesses across the United States but specializes Southern California especially San Diego County, Orange County, Los Angeles County, Riverside County and San Bernardino County.
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