Resilience

It is true that like all systems made by humans a VoIP system can fail. However with up times in excess of 99.99% 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.
Call divert or relocate phones

If you have chosen not to implement a resilient solution, 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.

Emergency services

Your connection to the Internet will fail in the event of a power failure or other outage. If this happens your VoIP system will also fail. 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 an 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 not location specific, which means that if you make a 999 call the emergency services cannot locate where the call is coming from. There is a database to which the emergency services refer giving details of the location of the phone. The address which is registered in the web portal is automatically registered with that database. It is your responsibility to ensure the accuracy of this information. The emergency services will always regard a VoIP phone as being nomadic and request confirmation of the address on any call.

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 legacy system (for whatever reason) then you could use a hosted VoIP system as a backup.