Except when it doesn’t work they will try to find out what’s going on and they will look again where your number is listed they will find two numbers it might take a little longer but eventually they’ll find it, humans are very smart, but if you don’t have an alternative that’s ten times worse, if you prepare you put your local and toll-free on your website your social media your email signature and your business card this is going to be easy
And also lazy with short attention spans. When I call a number and can’t get through, unless it’s something 911 emergency urgent I just move onto something else and figure I’ll try later.
But way better then nothing
And you can be proactive instead of reactive, the bandwidth.com outage has quite a few news articles, you can just send out an email and social media to your customer list telling them how you are addressing the new growing threat, companies do it all the time
So as the provider, I give all my customers toll free numbers from another tier 1. OK, job done. Now it is up to the customer to update all their stuff and communicate it to their customers.
I mean I’d spend the extra money but I can’t guarantee everyone uses it.
But did you improve the situation yes 100% your customer will appreciated
I mean, this is a end user level solution you are proposing. So as the provider, if the customer asks for it I can provide it. Then again, the customer made decide to get this toll free from someone else since this is more a redundancy solution.
So really I’d be spending extra money for a solution to give a customer that might consider having both numbers with me a single point of failure and want to use another carrier for this.
I can’t speak about your business model, this is a much broader discussion, I’m a consultant I keep an eye out all the time on the market changes and I advise my clients and when I do that I have done my job, and I would say not educating your customer could be much worse for you the next time something like this happens, there’s enough news articles at this point to make this easy
I don’t advise my customers to spend money for something that won’t be used. Can business do things to potentially have solutions when a carrier is down? Yes, but for for business, that does not make it worth the complexity, cost, and general overhead. Because the business’ customers won’t call another number. They just try later, or send an email saying that they cannot call.
I have customers with a toll free on one carrier and a standard number on another. It doesn’t make customers use it. I know, because I get the trouble ticket reports when one is down.
Again you’ll still get the trouble tickets but the situation will be much better, and if you have a customer that is already spending on redundancy this makes total sense, and as this situation becomes the new Norm what other option do you have besides being completely out for a few days?
Same. We have had the same published toll-free number and local DID number for over 20 years now. Both have been published on our website for as long too.
When I look at the billing records I see we get maybe 10 calls to the toll-free number and several thousand calls to the local DID number each month. Nowadays since calling long distance usually isn’t billed like back in the day at like 25 cents a minute or something no one care about toll-free generally as much.
As this situation becomes the norm this will change, you’re not adding any value if you don’t have a better solution for the problem, having the attitude that nothing will work doesn’t fix anything and it’s not interesting, I would love to hear another creative idea from anyone with more experience then me anyone is welcome
Carriers could certainly solve this IF they wanted to. For example, incoming call hits carrier, carrier looks up DID routing in a non-public database, attempts to forward call and if it fails routes to secondary destination stored in non-public database. Unfortunately, most major carriers don’t want to route calls to their competitors EVER.
Not really if they’re sip servers are down, and their forward infrastructure is down, maybe they can maybe they can’t, but provider redundancy always an important part for companys
So you’re saying that the PSTN is natively SIP VoIP throughout their networks from start to finish?
Having your second provider as a copper PRI could be an option but more and more of these providers are removing their entire copper back-end and relying more and more on the internet up to your circuit, Direct interconnection could be the new way telnyx is offering it if you are on AWS it’s like a private VLAN on the internet maybe more providers will embrace interconnection for more of their infrastructure between carriers and between and-users
Smaller businesses cannot or will not likely shoulder the additional expense of essentially duplicating their phone and data networks in order to see the benefits of building something like this out.
I’m thinking out loud if my company execs ask me what I could put into place to better handle scenarios like we are seeing…
I might suggest something to them along the lines of primary connects coming in via AT&T IP Flex. Figure I’d hope AT&T’s network is better equipped to handle bad actors. Since we already have AT&T dedicated fiber Internet, piping SIP down it would be a service add-on. And that’s assuming that AT&T is the true SIP service provider. Then as for secondary connects, if I was able to bring in another Tier 1 provider such as Verizon or Level 3, assuming they are the originating SIP service provider, then there would be more fault tolerance if an incident occurs. Although it’s unlikely that a service address can get a second Tier 1 with presence in the same area.
Again, paying for duplicating the phone and data networks will likely be a cost that the execs will have trouble swallowing. But at least the proposal will be out there.
My business model is I am a provider. So telling my customers to also got get service from X competitor just opens a whole can of worms I dont want to deal with. If the customer choose, on their own, to get a secondary provider there isnt much I can do. But sending competitors business doesn’t seem wise.
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I don’t see how connecting another SIP trunk to the PBX I set up has anything to do with competition telnyx and flowroute are not my competitor
Correct but they are technically mine. My reply was in the context of you not know my business model.
Me recommending another provider is akin to you recommending another IT Consultant in case you have an outage.