How do you and your company deal with VoIP phone service outages?

A few weeks ago, we posted a story about Google Voice experiencing some downtime and boy did it get a lot of responses. What was clear from the responses we got is that people love their Google Voice service. Some love it enough to forgive the random outage, others love it so much they don't want to hear new reports about it going down. I, for one, am interested more in the implications of IP phone service outages and that's the main reason FierceVoIP ever mentions them, whether it be Google's problem or some other VoIP company's.

Our commenters had some great points. For one, ideally no phone service should have downtime, but most only guarantee 99.9 percent uptime. You never know when an ice storm is going to take out phone lines, or some sort of maintenance needs to be performed. But a few hours a year is a drop in the bucket when the rest of the time service is smooth. One commenter noted that none of his phones worked 100 percent of the time--as anyone with a cellphone in farm country can probably relate.

Additionally, the Google Voice service is seen by many as a tool in their box of telecom tricks. You might not use it for your main phone number, but it offers text messaging, custom greetings and provides users with a way to decide which of their many phones should get calls at any particular time. The service accomplishes a lot and if you have back ups or use it only to supplement your other VoIP phone services, then you probably aren't phased by downtime.

So users build redundancy into their own personal VoIP phone usage, but companies and VoIP service providers can do the same. Does your business have an IP comm backup plan? Does your VoIP service company provide customers reassurances or redundancies? How about equipment makers: any new ways we are keeping things afloat? What are some of the ways your company reduces service outages? -Mike