What happens if the T-1 link to UniVoIP goes down?

How does the system behave when the T-1 link to UniVoIP goes down and how can it be mitigated or backed up?

As with any communications technology, there may be rare occasions when the T-1 link provided by the local carrier may experience an outage.   When this occurs, UniVoIP’s Hosted PBX system will behave in the following fashion: 

  • Calls in progress will be terminated.
  • No ext-ext or outbound calls may be initiated.
  •  Any inbound call destined to an extension or call group will not ring at the designated phone/s and will revert to the extension or call group’s call coverage (i.e., voicemail, auto attendant, external phone number, etc.).  Please note that unlike a CPE-based solution where the inbound callers will receive a busy tone, your callers will not notice an outage as their calls will be answered in some fashion depending on your specific system configuration.
  • Any inbound call destined to an auto attendant will be answered by the auto attendant.
  •  State of call features on the phones (i.e., forwarding, DND) will remain intact.
  • Any call to a twinned extension will continue to be delivered to the twinned destination (i.e., external number such as a cell phone).
  • Internet connectivity will be lost if provided by UniVoIP over the same T-1 link.

 

There are a number of proactive and reactive measures that can be taken to mitigate the affects of the outage while the restoration of the T-1 link is in progress: 

  • Ensure that all business critical extensions are programmed with a call coverage such as voicemail, forwarded to an external number or twinned.
  • Ensure that all your business critical phone numbers/DIDs have been preprogrammed with an override destination (i.e., cell phone, extension/call group in a different site, a land line, etc.).  The overrides may be activated via the web portal or by contacting UniVoIP’s support team.
  • Maintain a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) from the local carrier where the business critical calls can be routed to.
  • Maintain a secondary stand-alone or bonded T-1 link for redundancy.
  • Maintain a separate broadband (i.e., ADSL, Cable, etc.) Internet access.  By utilizing a separate Internet access a number of business critical phones can be quickly reconfigured to Teleworker mode and be connected to UniVoIP over the Internet.  Teleworker phones connected via the Internet will function in the same exact fashion as if connected over the T-1 link.