Can You Have Disaster Recovery for Voice with PRI?

As voice services continue to migration from traditional to VoIP, questions arise about bridging that gap. One of the more frequent questions we receive surrounds DR for voice using a PRI. Can it be done?

In short, it can, but it’s clunky. Read below to learn why and what you can do to enable true disaster recovery (DR) for voice.

What do We Mean When We’re talking About DR for Voice?

In most cases, when we talk about disaster recover for voice, we’re looking at how to keep calls flowing in the event of a local outage. Whether it’s an extended power outage, fire, flood, or any other disaster which might cripple a business, the calls still need to go somewhere as most businesses still rely on voice as their primary way to communicate with clients.

Phone system technology has advanced to the point now where new business phone systems are now almost always IP-based systems. The old digital box systems with cards for each function are going the way of the dodo bird. The problem is that even though businesses are moving to an IP-based phone system, they’re still plugging traditional PRI lines into the back of them.

PRI, while tried and true, doesn’t fully leverage the ability of the IP system to route traffic. The PRI line is owned and managed by the phone company and has “X” number of phone numbers attached to the service. It’s a static service and not at all nimble like SIP. Because of this, building a DR plan with PRI is extremely challenging.

Businesses utilizing PRI service would be well served to set up SIP or Hosted PBX service with a VoIP carrier like N2Net. Then, in the event of a local outage, the main number used with the PRI can be forwarded to the SIP trunk.

Why it’s clunky is because the forwarding is a manual process rather than automatic. Service calls need to be placed with the PRI carrier and the forwarding has to be set up from the carrier’s side.

The Right Solution

Businesses utilizing IP-based phone systems would be wise to utilize SIP carrier services for voice transport and usage. Not only is SIP typically much less expensive, it is flexible and much more nimble than traditional PRI service. When combined with hosted PBX, SIP with N2Net can offer a seamless failover in the event of a local outage or equipment failure.

Partner With Experts

Here at N2Net we own and control our own network and have the engineering and support expertise to architect custom voice and data solutions for our clients. When it comes to disaster recovery for voice, we know what we’re doing because we’ve been put to the test.

Talk to one of our experts today and learn how to best leverage our technology to ensure your calls keep flowing in the event of an outage.