Written by mojotech | Jun 8, 2018 4:00:00 AM
You see it everywhere in today’s online culture of self-promotion. The facts never live up to the marketing fluff. Recently, one promotion I came across from a cloud communications service provider claimed 99.9999% service availability or six nines. To an untrained ear this sounds fantastic. Many providers boast about reliability, but claiming 99.9999? Really?
So You Say You’ve Got Five Nines? If you take a quick read on service availability (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_availability), six nines or 99.9999 equates to 32 seconds of downtime per YEAR. A step lower to five nines availability or 99.999 is 5.26 minutes of downtime per YEAR, and four nines or 99.99 comes in 52.60 minutes of downtime per YEAR. Now on to the fun part: some real-world examples. AT&T’s vaunted MPLS service guarantees 99.99 uptime, allowing themselves 52.60 minutes of downtown per year. Our friends over at Windstream take it a step further with their MPLS service, claiming all the way up to five nines or 99.999% reliability. Wow, Windstream MPLS is better than AT&T MPLS in service availability? Uh oh, read the fine print, they state “any loss of Service Availability” less than five (5) minutes in duration will not be included in the calculation of Service Availability”. Interesting. 99.999% per month equates to 26.30 seconds per month of downtime. 99.99% equates to 4.38 minutes per month. Windstream advertises five nines availability in a given month but only guarantees something less than four nines. The marketing people seem to be working in overdrive here.
Fact Check An interesting crowd sourcing website to make a quick check on some of the biggest service providers is just a click away. Down Detector
www.downdetector.com will actually show the dates and numbers of outages a service provider has actually experienced. This is a link to look at our friends from 8×8:
http://downdetector.com/status/8×8/archive, and Nextiva:
http://downdetector.com/status/nextiva/archive, and Ring Central:
http://downdetector.com/status/ringcentral/archive, and Fuze:
http://downdetector.com/status/fuze/archive, and the final example is Level 3:
http://downdetector.com/status/level3/archive
Apples to Oranges So, how does this compare to an on premise IP PBX? Frankly, attempting to compare an on-premise VoIP system like Avaya, Shoretel, or Mitel to the measurements described above is very much like comparing apples and oranges. Loss of network renders any on premise PBX system essentially useless, even though the hardware manufacturer had nothing to do with the carrier outage. One of our large customers with an on-premise VoIP system recently was down for nearly 5 hours – in one day. They had two different carriers coming into a campus environment from two different paths. Seems safe until you figure out that those carriers were running down the same telephone poles roughly 3 miles from campus when they split to run separately unto the campus. However tragic, an accident occurred at a point in the path where both carriers were on the same pole and both fiber links were severed. Not all “redundant” paths are created equal. Another example we recently witnessed was in a hospital environment. The hospital’s telephone system was being powered by batteries connected to a UPS. The hospital staff changed the batteries out for normal wear and tear and accidentally cross wired the batteries back to the UPS. When the UPS was powered back on, it was instantly fried leaving the hospital without telephone service for over 12 hours while they procured and reinstalled a new UPS system.
How to Protect Yourself Understand where your service is coming from. Is your service delivered from hardened carrier grade datacenters or local data centers? Understand your service provider’s network. Is your service providers network fault tolerant and fully geo-redundant? Understand Network monitoring. Does your service provider actively monitor your service for jitter and latency? Finally, understand business continuity plans. Is business continuity built into the platform in the event of network outage? At Altus, our services are powered by Cisco’s award winning Broadsoft platform. Our platform does sit in four geographically redundant active-active carrier grade data centers. We proactively monitor all of our customer’s traffic through our Packetsmart platform to ensure optimal quality and our business continuity capability enables each of our customers to have the voice traffic automatically failover to secondary sites, cell phones, or our mobile application in the event of a carrier network outage. When your voice services are your business, Altus ensures your services will be available. Take tour of our services at
www.getaltus.com
About Altus Altus is the premier choice for cloud-based business communications, providing companies with flexible and secure technologies that help employees and customers stay connected more easily. Whether looking for basic voice service, comprehensive unified communications, contact center, or network services, business executives trust Altus to deliver the latest features and functionality at affordable prices. Start communicating better with Altus. For more information, visit www.altustechnology.com or call toll free 866.922.4001