Although anyone can use our service, we run a network particularly for small business users and you have told us that reliability of service is your number one requirement - we are aware how much you rely on us; as we do ourselves.

 

You are also concerned about call quality because for business use, call quality must be excellent at all times.

 

Consequently we have built a very robust network. Our up time during 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 & 2011 as measured independently by Monitor Us, was 99.99%.

 

And, because we are UK based, fully digital and use client server technology which allows us to fully manage the quality of our service, call quality far exceeds a normal landline or mobile telephone call.

Data Centre

 

Our network is housed in Europe's largest data centre in London's Docklands. It has resilient infrastructure, including multiple levels of 24/7 security, stable, high-capacity power supplies backed by UPS, stand-by diesel generators and SLA, fire protection, in-house support and environmental controls.

 

Connectivity & Network

 

We use multiple sourced connectivity from blue chip providers using managed services backed by SLA. Our network checks your connection to us and uses the best route to connect you. It has multiple levels of failover and redundancy - if we lose one network provider another kicks in, usually without loss of connection.

 

We peer directly - over two independent networks - with most large UK ISPs eg BT, Virgin (NTL, Telewest), Level3, Pipex, Telia, Tiscali, MFN, Easynet etc ie we do not use the public internet to carry your calls.

 

Call Termination

 

We connect to two Tier 1 Call Termination Providers by physical cable with peered internet back-up. This means that you get the best call quality possible and double redundancy enabling us to switch automatically between providers and type of connection should either have a problem.

 

Call Failover

 

Calls to exotic foreign destinations can occasionally fail because of distant end routing and congestion problems - not all countries have high quality networks and it's fairly common for some countries to give a network engaged answer on the first attempt.

 

With our network, a call that fails to connect first time will be switched automatically over several other routes and operators until a working connection is found. You will not be aware that any of this is happening and it will be a very rare event indeed if your call fails to connect entirely.

 

Hardware and Hardware Redundancy

 

We use only Enterprise class equipment; Juniper routers and firewalls, Cisco switching and HP voice servers. Each hardware component in our network is duplicated or has a redundant and mirrored, hot back-up.

 

This means that a failure of an individual server should not cause any loss of service; the back-up will automatically take up the load on failover.

 

Voice Server Failover. Our voice and registration servers are load balanced and operate in failover mode. This means that if one fails the others just carry on regardless and also means that as we grow we can just add more without interrupting your existing service.

 

Customer Failover Diverts

 

In the real world, service interruption is more likely to occur at your end of the network than ours. So we have introduced PSTN Failover Divert.

 

You can now enter a PSTN or mobile telephone number for your calls to be diverted to if your telephones stop registering with us for any reason. You can find them here: https://www.voipfone.co.uk/index.php?action=Divert

 

Operations, Notifications & Processes

 

As our network grows and our technology develops, we will still need to do continuous upgrades and routine maintenance. Because our network has been designed from the outset to scale linearly with growth our servers can be removed and worked on without service downtime and as much as we can, any service affecting work will be done out of office hours.

 

We will always warn you of this via the web site or our forum and support pages. You can find it here: http://www.voipfoneuserforum.com

 

This forum is housed in a separate building on a separate network from voipfone.co.uk so will be available in the unlikely event that we are not.

 

Monitoring and Alarms

 

We use Nagios monitoring (with a variety of plug-ins) across our entire network which provides real time alarms, notification and reporting across everything we do, from individual servers and processes to ports and routers and to peering and connectivity.

 

We also monitor and log individual user's connections on request for fault finding. This means that if any of our services has a problem, we know about it and fix it before you notice.

 

You can also subscribe to the announcements forum which will then alert you to anything we post there about problems, new services or planned maintenance.

http://www.voipfoneuserforum.com/viewforum.php?f=1

 

We believe that all this will give us a fully stable, reliable and scalable platform that we can build confidently on and provide you with the best possible service.

 

Unfortunately, it does not mean that we will never have problems. VoIP is a new technology, we are pushing development hard and do take some risks to get new services out to you - glitches are therefore still inevitable, particularly in new software but, barring Acts of God and terrorists, those problems that do occur should be rare and quickly resolved.