Redundant inbound trunks?

[Fred Rat]

Recently my Voice ISP had an issue for a couple hours and were off the air.
Our office was fine for outbound calls since we have multiple provisioned and asterisk fell back to the next one in the outbound routing list.

However, our inbound calls have been ported to our Voice ISP and since they were 'dead', we did not receive any calls.

Is there anyway to solve this problem?
I'm thinking of something like a DNS'ish system with multiple ISPs registered to handle a given phone number. I'm guessing this isn't possible, but I'm just using that as an example.

Anyone got any ideas/thoughts on how to add redundancy to inbound calls?

Are any of the service providers known to have a better inbound redundancy story. I've been happy with mine, but it's clear that there was some single point of failure and it failed.


Steve

 

[imekul]

I think he might be asking if there is a backup in case whoever your DID holder is -- voip.ms, for example -- has a problem or goes offline or whatnot.

For instance, if I had my DID through voip.ms, but could somehow have my DID automatically go through Callcentric or some other provider in the event that voip.ms was having issues.

 

[briankelly63]

A solution depends on your size and customers.... At home I maintain 2 PSTN's that are forwarded to local SIP DID's. If the Telco goes down I would have the same issue but the Telco's reliability, at least their switch, is far higher than the typical VOIP provider which has no control of the internet or their upstream providers.

If I have a VOIP incoming problem I just reprogram the call forwarding number and the problem is solved. Some Telco's allow this to be done remotely in case you lose access to the PSTN line itself.

In a larger commercial situation it might be appropriate to provide an alternate number to your customers (other VOIP or PSTN) that you might bill as a "priority", "direct", "emergency" etc type number. Under normal conditions these extra paths are routed to your normal extensions. Should the unexpected occur the routes can be changed very quickly.

In the future your directory number may truly be "owned" by you and you'll be able to port it as easily as you program call forwarding right now.

 

[Fred Rat]

That is correct. My VOIP provider does allow me to forward if MY PBX is down; the issue IS if the DID holder such as voip.ms is down.
The switch the forwarding from the Telco option is something we used to do, when we were first testing VOIP. But it that was just an anoying expense to pay the Telco for the privilege of forwarding the calls.
One responder mentioned that in the future we "may" have the ability to switch DID providers quickly at our will; if that were the case, I could have manually or under script control, have automatically have flipped the DID to another provider and that would have very nicely worked around the DID provider being off the air. Is that something that is being worked on, or is that just a wish?
Thanks all, but this still leaves me wondering what everyone else does when their DID provider goes off-line. Customer screams and you say "...wait...?"

 

[wardmundy]

That's why most folks retain a MaBell line if your business depends upon 99.9% uptime. Many of the Bell Sisters permit you to forward off the main number (to a VoIP DID, for example) thereby freeing up the main number.