A cautionary tale: in 2007, VoIP provider SunRocket declared bankruptcy. Their support staff found out when they called their own toll-free number to find out why their phones weren’t lighting up. 200,000 customers found out when they could no longer place or receive calls.
For your protection, please consider the following questions when selecting a vendor:
Who owns the equipment?
Most VoIP companies don’t own or operate their own systems – instead, they remarket “white label” solutions operated by wholesale providers. If something goes wrong, their support staff doesn’t have the professional expertise to solve your issue. Instead, they themselves call wholesale support and attempt to convey your issue to the engineers – with whom you are unable to communicate directly.
At BWTel, our technical support representatives are our engineers, able to monitor our systems and address issues in real time. We own our equipment – and everything is duplicated, with fully-redundant systems to prevent a computer failure from causing a long disruption.
Who controls my phone number?
VoIP companies may be loathe to admit it, but most of them aren’t telephone companies at all. In many states, Internet telephone service is considered a data service, and is largely unregulated – meaning that a century’s progress in consumer protection no longer applies. Furthermore, the average VoIP company is relying upon a third-party carrier to maintain numbers for its customers.
BWTel, by contrast, is a regulated telecommunications carrier, registered with multiple states and the FCC. As a telecommunications carrier, BWTel is registered and controls over 100,000 phone numbers under the North American Numbering Plan Administration (NANPA).
What about outages and Disaster Recovery?
Offices lose power, Internet connections go down, equipment fails – it’s not a matter of if, but when.
At BWTel, our pro-active monitoring protects you in the event of an outage. If your phones cannot be reached because of a power or connectivity issue, failover systems will provide an auto attendant, routing to cell phones, and other backup solutions until you are back online. As far as our own systems, we have redundant equipment in our main facility, plus a backup plan engaging cloud service providers to keep your phones up and running at all times.