Replacing ISDN with SIP - What provider has best redundancy?

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Wadec

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#279742 5-Nov-2020 06:44

Hi there, we are replacing our ISDN lines in our call centre - believe they are shutting down the service next year. We are a call centre and some of our incoming lines are for emergencies. Is there a Sip provider that has better redundancy options than others? Is one considered safer than others?

antoniosk

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#2598010 5-Nov-2020 07:06

This is more a matter for how you engineer your network connection (s).

It used to be a common but expensive config to bring two fibres into two routers, following different physical paths (if available), across data centres.

if your requirements are not so eclectic, then two internet connections into a load balanced pair that is transparent to your call centre app is always a good way to go.

How many concurrent calls are you looking at? 20?

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Antoniosk

Wadec

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#2598013 5-Nov-2020 07:11

Thanks. We do have dual internet paths but I have seen with 2talk outages on their end so that is the other area of redudnancy I am unsure of. We have had 2talk outages where we can't even divert our lines. Not often but just a scary thing to happen. At peak we have around 20 people on the phones at once so we probably need to allow for 30, given people on hold

sbiddle

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#2598023 5-Nov-2020 07:43

Being such a small business you need to weight up the pros and cons of all solutions and whether looking at the cheapest VoIP provider in the market is the best solution for your requirements.

If you want true redundancy you need to consider redundancy for broadband (multiple providers and multiple technologies for true redundancy) and having multiple providers for voice. All of this will cost $$$, and for a company that's small like you it probably doesn't stack up financially.

antoniosk

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#2598048 5-Nov-2020 08:25

Yeah, as steve said. A 20 person call centre is definetly not small, but given comms and the internet are your lifeblood, perhaps reconsider your supplier. 2talk was and is cheap because its complete DIY, and so much is beyond your control if things go wrong. When it works it's fine, like all things, but when it breaks thats when support and reliability really matters.

I've been out of the voip market for a little while now, so not sure if the service offerings have evolved to a middle ground between fully managed and fully DIY

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Antoniosk

Wadec

23 posts

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#2598054 5-Nov-2020 08:32

Thanks for that! Yes, hoping to get some feedback on what the best solution would be :) Not married to 2talk so can jump to another provider if they are the safest and more reliable option

old3eyes

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#2598113 5-Nov-2020 09:29

If you run a call center then you want reliability with a dedicated SIP trunk circuit. Cutting cost to save money will cause grief so look at someone with a good track record like Spark , Orcon or Vodafone. When I was in the industry I saw much grief from companies trying to cut costs..

Regards,

Old3eyes

Wadec

23 posts

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#2598115 5-Nov-2020 09:33

Thanks! This is not a cost saving exercise. We received notification that our ISDN lines are going to be stopped so looking for the next best thing :) We had some 2talk lines already for another low priority service. Thanks for your help.

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cisconz

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#2598120 5-Nov-2020 09:41

I would suggest Vodafone as they use the old WxC core and infrastructure, plus they will terminate on a dedicated connection.

For 30 concurrent calls they would be a similar cost to ISDN.

The other option is getting a second set of published numbers, 1 from them and 1 from 2Talk - then in an emergency users can call the other line (We used to use 0800 xxx xxx vs 0508 xxx xxx) so people could call on both at any time.

Hmmmm

trig42

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#2598123 5-Nov-2020 09:44

We are going through a similar exercise. We have 10+ locations on Basic Rates, which are going EOL about next March.

Phones are important, but not super critical (retail). We are trialing Vodafone One Business at two of our sites in the next few weeks. Each site has 10-14 handsets, but they probably only make/take about 200 calls a day per site. V1B is attractive because of it's cloud based configuration options, and the ability to easily re-route/divert calls if a site goes down. Also attractive to us is the ability to easily add out-of-office messages and on hold announcements (which we discovers was a PITA when we went into lockdown and didn't have physical access to our old PABXs in each location).

chevrolux

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#2598140 5-Nov-2020 10:05

As a Voyager wholesaler, we can redirect calls offnet when the softswitch is down - I guess they have something sitting between the "cloud pbx platform" and the interconnects?

In the last outage they had (DDoS attack of some nature) calls couldn't progress in or out of the pbx platform, but we were able to redirect calls off to 2talk and our customers didn't even notice the outage. Our customer phone systems just have two trunks configured on it, and the only manual interaction id for us to "activate" the preset redirects to the 2talk numbers.