I hear what you’re saying about VoIP being such a great deal, but what happens to our VoIP phones if our internet goes down?
Boy, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve been asked that question, I’d be able to finance my kids’ college tuition (well, a few days of it, anyway). Maybe that was a bad example, but the point is, I get that question a lot.
And the short answer is, it's not a significant risk. The possibility of losing your VoIP phone signal is tiny, especially when compared to the benefits.
The longer answer follows. First of all, you should ask yourself how often your internet goes down. In the early days of Internet, it was not uncommon to lose your internet signal. If you’re like me, you remember dial-up modems that routinely failed to connect. We’d be stuck twiddling our thumbs, wondering how to watch Hamster Dance with no internet. And even though those days are long gone, many of my customers still remember how frustrating it was. Like them, you may be thinking in the back of your mind that we’re still at the mercy of that unreliable technology.
But have no fear. Internet providers these days seldom experience signal failure. Most of them boast a 99.99% up-time.
“But,” you may be saying, “what about that 0.01%? That’s like the fine print in a contract. They make it sound like it’s no big deal, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t.”
Alright, let’s talk about that 0.01% loss of internet signal. First of all, by my math, 0.01% of a year is 0.876 hours. (365 days x 24 hours in a day = 8760 hours in a year. 0.01 % of that is 0.876. Math people, correct me if I’m wrong.) So, less than one hour per year. That number is even tinier if you count your operating hours, when your customers are most likely to call.
You're more likely to have a power outage in your office, but that doesn’t stop you from having devices that would go stop working without it, does it? No, of course not. What do you do in the case of power failure? Since it’s so infrequent, you probably don’t worry about it. Your customers understand if your power fails. There's a certain amount of technology hiccups we're all willing to accept. It happens to everyone, and all technological devices. If it is a concern, though, you have a battery backup just in case.
Too bad there isn’t something like that for your VoIP phones… Oh wait! There is!
We can set your VoIP phones up with a backup Fail Safe system to make sure that your phones still function in the event of an internet failure. We have a device that you can use that will reroute calls to a cell phone number in the case of an internet outage. That means that customers calling in your main number can reach you through your cell phone. That means that calls into your main number will ring your cell phone in the event of an internet outage.
If it sounds like I'm splitting hairs here, it's just that I hate to see you make a decision not to upgrade to VoIP based on fear of what might happen less often than one hour per year. Because VoIP is so great, and for so many reasons.
The point is, the trend in business is certainly moving toward cloud-based communications (VoIP phone systems, Cloud-based software, and on-line storage), and with good reason. The infrastructure is truly secure and stable – and getting more so all the time. This is a stable infrastructure with many backup servers and increasingly robust hardware. This is not the internet of 10 years ago or even five years ago. It’s not even the internet of two years ago! Internet service providers are constantly improving the integrity of their signals by upgrading their hardware (for example, by switching to fiber).
If you're letting the fear of internet failure keep you from saving *at least* 50% on your dial tone each month, I encourage you to reconsider.
Give us a call. We can quickly give you a quote to show you just how much money VoIP will save you every month, while adding more features than you have using traditional lines.
