The Importance of Resilience and Redundancy in an IP Telecoms Network
Telecommunications is perhaps the most important service that is provided within any business, as it will almost certainly causes the most disruption when an issues manifests, or in the event of a full blown telecommunications outage. In the event of a full service outage, not only are your workforce unable to make outbound telephone calls, which will impact on your ability to sell your services, but your customers are also unable to get in contact with you. Given these facts, the importance of resiliency and redundancy of any IP telecoms network warrants careful consideration to ensure you are not put in a situation where your business grinds to a holt due to telephony issues. Here are some things to consider questioning of your existing provider, or any new IP based provider.
Connectivity
To ensure that your business remains connected and able to make and receive calls at all times, it is important to ensure that your IP telecoms supplier has multiple ways of connecting into their data centres. For example, there is no use having a single high speed fibre connection between your supplier and their data centre, on the basis that if there is a problem with the fibre, then they are without connectivity. For this reason it is always a sensible approach to have multiple methods of connectivity including fibre, internet, or high capacity wireless connectivity.
Multiple Peers
The vast majority of IP telecoms networks interconnect with a variety of different carriers in order to deliver sufficient capacity to their customers. In addition to this, they also connect to a multitude of carriers for resiliency purposes so that they are still able to route traffic in the event of any issues with one of their carriers. This is the best way of ensuring that no carrier issues are able to cause issues for their customers.
Data Centre Provisions
In order to achieve redundancy and resilience from a data centre perspective, there needs to be careful consideration taken in a number of areas. Firstly, it is always recommended to have services operate out of dual, geographically dispersed data centres so that if there are any issues in one data centre, then there is no service interruption. In addition to this, the data centres that are chosen by the IP telecoms network should always have provisions in place with respect to power so that they are able to continue to operate via UPS (Uninterrupted Power Source) in the event of a power cut to ensure service continuity.