What happens to my VOIP phone if internet goes down?

Although it is great to take advantage of savings brought by the use of IP phone systems (Business grade VOIP), the concern for many businesses is what would happen to calls if the Internet goes down? This is a valid and real concern. The answer is simple but the solution is one that requires a review of specifics of each business, choices of lines based on physical address, and a few other elements. But we are going to present it in a simple format here.

The simple answer is called FAIL OVER, which means having other types of phone connectivity to re-route incoming calls to while the Internet connection is down. We normally advise clients to retain their existing Analog line(s) for Fax, Credit card, and Burglar Alarm.

When we place our Ericsson-LG IP phone systems within your Business office, we can connect a few analog lines to it as backup lines. During the installation and setup of the system, we build a fail-over plan within your line provider’s systems to automatically redirect all calls to the Analog backup lines that are hooked in the back of the IP phone system should your Internet lines go down (which is very rare these days).

So you are not going to lose any calls since they are still coming through and you are not forced to have calls forwarded to a single cell phone where it is awkward to pass around to whoever the call is for then be unable to take any additional calls. Your phone system is still fully functional handling all calls seamlessly. The lines will switch back to Digital or VOIP as soon as Internet connection is re-established. The beauty of it is that this is all automated without the need for any human intervention.

Such fail-over protections in the seamless manner described above are not possible with the Cloud based Phone systems that the phone system’s brain is outside your premises in a data center. Best those systems can do is to route the calls to an individual analog phone or a Cell phone which is rather inefficient.