I called my 80-year-old aunt a few days ago and heard something I’ve sort of forgotten about, you might have as well, it’s a busy signal. My aunt lives in a rural part of the state and has a single line analog phone (without caller-id even). When she’s on the phone, no one else can call in. This reminded me of a feature now found in most hosted PBX systems, survivability. Learn more at http://bullfrog.net With a traditional phone system, all call processing hardware is located on-site, along with handsets, call recording equipment, voice mail servers, voice circuits, and music-on-hold sources. In the event of an act of God, fire, flood, tornado, tsunami, earthquake, power outage, hardware or software failure, underground or aerial digging, or any other possible scenario that can disrupt a business, each one of these can and will prevent you from receiving and making calls. As discussed in a previous article, it’s important that when selecting a hosted PBX provider, you make sure they are able to re-route calls in the event of an outage.   In a hosted PBX solution, the call processing, call recording, voice mail servers, and music-on-hold sources are usually located in a highly available co-location facility or data center. The PBX can be configured, as in the previous example, to an alternate number, such as a cell phone. This destination is only used when the phone is unregistered (unreachable), as in the case of an Internet circuit outage or power outage at the small business location. So, don’t give your customers the option of hearing “All circuits are busy…”. With the survivability feature inherent in a hosted PBX solution, your customers may never even know that you had an outage. As always, we’d love to hear from you. Have you experienced an outage that took your communications down or have you been fortunate enough to benefit from hosted PBX?