With nearly all corporate operations relying on telecom or mobile connectivity, outages have the potential to halt an entire business. In fact, Gartner has estimated the cost of network downtime can amount to around $5,600 per minute, which translates to more than $300,000 lost every hour for the average business, keeping in mind the amount varies based on the scale and nature of the business. No business can afford to lose its telecommunications connectivity since it is integral to most business processes and the reality is, they don’t have to.
Last week, Comcast’s Xfinity phone service suffered a massive outage knocking out VoIP phone service for thousands of companies across the country that still largely rely on landline access to do business. Unfortunately, Comcast was unable to avoid the issue because they didn’t have the technology in place to detect the issue and then re-route to another peer. Therefore customers were without telephone service for 24-48 hours.
How to avoid outages
With the heavy financial risks associated with network outages, it’s becoming critical for businesses of all sizes to analyze available telecom solutions and select a carrier option that works best for your industry, company size, and customer base.
Which is why many customers are turning to software-centric carriers like Flowroute who have a high level of telecom expertise with roots in software development. What makes Flowroute unique is its patented HyperNetwork™, which delivers unprecedented inbound voice reliability and uptime. The HyperNetwork detects and re-routes calls around network issues or service degradation across any carrier’s network. Having this ability would have greatly reduced the impact of Comcast’s outage on its customers.
Switching providers and taking the first steps of changing communication providers can be a complicated and daunting process – especially after an outage. As with any technology purchase decision, conducting in-depth research is important to ensure you find the service provider best-suited to meet your company’s unique needs. Below is a checklist of five criteria your future cloud communications service provider should offer:
- Adaptive call routing through the HyperNetwork™. The most critical prerequisite, adaptive call routing provides the ability to mesh disparate physical networks into a single telecom network in the event of quality degradation or network congestion. Transferring between networks without the pain of waiting on a third party to solve the problems will help a business and its customers resume normal operations more quickly.
- Direct peering relationships. Peering is the relationship between separate networks that allows access for the direct exchange of traffic. When direct peering arrangements are established, a carrier becomes stronger by tapping into alternative networks in case of primary interconnection failures. Selecting a provider with multiple peering agreements provides trusted assurance that calls will be carried over to a default and functional network route when the outage occurs.
- Access to CDRs. Call detail records (CDRs) include the call time, duration, source, and destination-number, as well as completion status of the call. Quick access to the data produced by the communication exchange, as well as the messaging and billing records from the network, can help locate, diagnose, and resolve the issue from the source.
- Real-time SIP traces. SIP traces can provide critical information to help troubleshoot SIP trunks, endpoints, and other SIP-related issues. Real-time resolution in debugging the information that is gathered will help improve customer satisfaction, lower churn-rate and reduce outage and other SIP issue resolution time. Providers that run SIP traces to capture traffic will save time and resources compared to forcing your customers to set up equipment at the router and individual PBX levels.
- Support teams. In addition to the software and technical infrastructure checkboxes, it is also important that providers have telecom experts in-house that are available to jump in at critical moments to ensure issues are solved in a timely matter. Support teams that respond to emergencies with the utmost transparency can make or break how a business handles, communicates and recovers from an outage.
Partnering with the right software-centric carriers will not only provide businesses with added confidence, but it will also provide the ability to mitigate network outages, ensure operations run uninterrupted, and customers remain connected. If you are looking to learn more about how Flowroute can help you with communication services that are reliable and scalable, please drop us a note at sales@flowroute.com.
