VOIP Providers

How to Quantify Reliability

Here at Millennia Technologies, we get asked all the time about how we can deliver the same kind of reliability that phone lines offer through Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service. We understand the concern because running your phone service over the internet simply cannot offer 100% reliability. We can get very close to it, but there are simply no providers out there that can realistically offer VoIP service and promise no downtime at all.
When Redundancy Works
Redundancy in VoIP is an alternative route for data to use in case the main route experiences a failure. These additional routes help to minimize complete outages.

To help clients understand the VoIP reliability factor better, providers usually publish their uptime percentages, which represents the amount of time their users experienced downtime over the course of a year.  For the most part, providers have uptimes between 99.99% and 99.999%. However, even though those numbers may seem very close, it makes a significant difference in the amount of downtime a customer will experience. The ideal number is “five 9’s” or, 99.999%.

For example, this chart identifies the vast differences these downtime percentages can create:

Understanding All-Inclusive Percentages
How do you know how your provider stacks up? Ask them. Any reputable provider should be able to provide you with this information as well as information and some clarity as to why they experienced the unscheduled downtime. Additionally, you should be aware of if the projected percentages are “all inclusive.” All-inclusive figures are the unscheduled …

How to Compare VOIP Providers

If you’ve landed here, you are probably one of the smart small business owners looking to experience the benefits of a hosted VoIP telephone system. You know that a traditional system either isn’t making financial or productivity sense for your business anymore. But with such a massive amount of choices out there today, you know you will need to do a VoIP comparison to determine which option is the right one for your particular business.

Here are some helpful tips to help you conduct your VoIP comparison:

Tip #1: Know What Your Needs Are

Telephone systems today can do pretty much anything aside of making you a grilled cheese sandwich, but that doesn’t mean you need every feature they can provide. Additionally, each of those features can cost you more money, so you will want to invest your resources into the functionality that is going to deliver the biggest return for your business. Think about what features you will actually use during your day-to-day operations, and if you know you probably won’t use most of the options that particular system provides, you may want to lower your price point. (That’s a good problem to have though, right?!)

Tip #2: Ask Questions

The market is saturated with VoIP providers today, obviously some of them are good providers and some of them are not. You need to be able to identify the good from the bad, and the best way to do so is to ask …