OnSIP Hosted PBX to the Rescue

With Hurricane Hanna bearing down on Florida last week I got a call from a Sunshine State customer who was worried about how his phone service would be effected if he lost power. The customer is using Junction Networks PSTN Gateway product to provide SIP trunking for his Switchvox PBX. He was looking for more than plain failover routing, where, in the event of a PBX failure, all calls are forwarded to a single cell phone or POTS line.

We set him up with an OnSIP Hosted PBX as his failover solution. When calls to his inbound numbers are unable to complete due to power failure they automatically get forwarded to an OnSIP auto-attendant. The caller hears a familiar menu choice (1 for sales, 2 for support etc.) and then the calls are routed to the POTS lines or cell phones of staff who are unaffected by the hurricane. Calls can even be routed to hunt groups, and ACD queue, or directly to voice mail boxes.

Luckily for Florida, Hurricane Hanna didn’t cause the damage it could have done. But our customer is keeping his OnSIP failover ready for whatever might happen next.