Reliability and Emergency

Reliability

It is true that like all systems made by human kind a VoIP system can fail.  However with up times in excess of 99.9% and rapid response times if things fail then we can usually fix things very quickly.  All Birchills Telecom's server arrays are multiple redundant and fail over seamlessly.  They are in secure data centres in the UK with both intruder and fire prevention systems.  They are continuously monitored and maintained.  We have never had a server hardware failure.

Service Levels

Birchills Telecom's redundant infrastructure is controlled by support personnel ready to solve issues.  There is a 24/7/365 response by trained engineers to any possible network outage

Ultimate Resilience

If ultimate reliability is your goal then you should not rely on any one communication system but have redundancy in all your systems.  So you could choose to back up a hosted VoIP solution with either an analogue solution or ISDN or a mobile solution.  Similarly if you choose to continue to use a traditional system for whatever reason then you could use a hosted VoIP system as a backup.

Call Divert or Relocate Phones

If you have chosen not to implement a resilient solution then in very unusual event of a failure we can usually divert the calls to your mobile.    Or you can always take your phones somewhere else - such as your home and plug them in again and you can work remotely

VoIP Is Not Always The Solution

It is true there are 2 situations that we know of where hosted VoIP is not appropriate

1) Where the analogue line which supports broadband also supports REDcare - the system will work but the technical requirements may conflict.

2) Where power failure is a critical problem - for example an essential phone in a lift.

Emergency Services

Your connection to the internet and broadband is not duplicated in a standard system which means that in the event of a power failure or other outage the telephone system will fail. This is common to all systems that use mains electricity as their sole source of power.

In the event such a failure you will not be able to use your system to make emergency 999 phone calls. We recommend that you have alternative system to allow you to make emergency phone calls in this event. Most of our customers use mobile phones as this alternative.

VoIP systems are free from geographic restraints which means that in the event of an emergency 999 call the emergency services cannot locate where the call is coming from. There is a database to which they can refer giving details of the location of the phone. You will be invited to submit the location of your phone for that database, however, if the phone is going to be used in different locations you may opt to mark the phone as “nomadic” in which case the emergency services will request it’s location in the event of an emergency call.