At VirtualPBX, we take a lot of pride in our business phone plan features, including our VoIP service uptime, which we advertise as 99.999 percent.
That last digit might seem showy. We don’t mean to brag, though. The final .009 addresses an important issue: we deliver phone system reliability that not every service provider can match.
Our claim of that last digit is anything but simple. We operate six servers across the globe, work with multiple phone carriers, and protect our networks with enterprise-quality firewalls and backups to assure that your phone system is reliable.
99.9 vs 99.99 vs 99.999 Percent
It bears repeating that the figure — 99.999 percent — isn’t meant to be flashy. When you round to that many places past the decimal, you actually see some significant effects.
There are 525,960 minutes in a year. When you break those minutes down by the whole percent, you end up with 5259.6 minutes in each percent. In other words: 525,960 / 100 = 5259.6
This means that, if we only offered 99 percent uptime, you could see outages in your phone system, on average, of 5,259 minutes a year. That’s almost four whole days! It’s clearly unacceptable.
You can extend those calculations to the tens, hundreds, and thousands place by dividing the number of days, respectively, by 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000.
| % Uptime | Downtime per year (minutes) |
|---|---|
| 99% Uptime | 5259 |
| 99.9% Uptime | 525 |
| 99.99% Uptime | 52 |
| 99.999% Uptime | 5 |
What we strive for at VirtualPBX is only five minutes per year of downtime. This industry gold standard is extremely difficult to reach, but it’s achievable through a number of efforts.
Global Servers
No VoIP service provider is equipped to properly handle enterprise clients without multiple servers to their name.
VirtualPBX’s global network of servers makes it possible for us to work with clients worldwide. They also assist with our reliability because we can lean on them as fallbacks for when a local outage occurs.
If, for instance, one of our U.S.-based servers experienced a power outage, we could immediately route traffic from that location to another inside the U.S.
Our clients’ calls would still connect because the second server picked up the slack.
Firewalls and Backups
In our servers, we use firewalls to protect malware from getting in, and we use backups to make sure your company information always remains accessible.
Our firewalls provide double-duty – like much of what you see in this article. They help keep the information in our servers safe by protecting them from internet malware and keeping bad actors at bay. They are essential for keeping yours and our data safe so the whole system can function as expected.
Similarly, our backups reach across multiple physical locations to provide a redundancy for both VirtualPBX processes and client information. Our global network gives us the ability to move important data from one secure lockbox to another. Everyone in our ecosystem remains protected and accessible.
Multiple Phone Carriers
As VoIP service provider, we connect calls through internet connections. We work with various phone carriers – think AT&T or Bandwidth – to connect calls to other VoIP devices, smartphones, and landlines.
In fact, the process of connecting calls can get complex, as we discuss in our feature about how VoIP calls use the PSTN.
The way we’re able to hand calls between users is by working with carriers. Our portfolio of relationships with these companies means we can reach phones across the globe, and it also means we can increase our uptime.
We aren’t limited to handing off calls to a single carrier. Therefore, if one of our carriers experiences a problem, we can look to others to help route calls to the proper destinations.
You can read even more about the structure of the public telephone network in our comprehensive guide, Does Your VoIP Service Measure Up?
We maintain and bolster our 99.999 percent reliability by doing everything we can to protect your data. We secure our relationships with carriers and work hard to continue our position as a leading VoIP service provider. Does your current service provider measure up? If your service isn’t what you expect, it could be time to switch to a better business phone plan.
