Reliability and Emergency Calls

Important: 999 and 112 emergency calls

Please read this section carefully — it affects your ability to call the emergency services.

  • Your VoIP service will fail if your power or broadband connection fails. Your connection to the internet will fail in the event of a power failure or other outage, and your VoIP system will fail with it. If this happens you will not be able to use your system to make 999 or 112 emergency calls.
  • Make alternative arrangements. We recommend you have an alternative means of making emergency calls in this event. Most of our customers use mobile phones as this alternative.
  • The emergency services cannot locate your call automatically. VoIP systems are not location specific — if you make a 999 call, the emergency services cannot tell where the call is coming from. They refer instead to a database giving details of the phone's location. The address registered in your web portal is automatically registered with that database, and location information received by the emergency services will be limited to that installation address, which may not be where you're actually calling from.
  • Keep your registered address accurate. It is your responsibility to ensure the accuracy of the address in your portal. The emergency services will always regard a VoIP phone as nomadic and will ask you to confirm your address on any call.

Resilience

Like all systems made by humans, a VoIP system can fail. However, with uptimes in excess of 99.99% and rapid response times if things do go wrong, we can usually fix things very quickly.

All Birchills Telecom's server arrays are multiply redundant and fail over seamlessly. They sit in secure UK data centres with intruder and fire prevention systems, and are continuously monitored and maintained. We have never had a server hardware failure.

Service levels

Our redundant infrastructure is controlled by support personnel ready to solve issues, with a 24/7/365 response by trained engineers to any possible network outage. See our Service Level Agreement for our target response and repair times.

Call divert or relocate your phones

If you've chosen not to implement a resilient solution, we can usually divert your calls to your mobile. Alternatively, you can take your phones somewhere else — such as your home — plug them in again, and carry on working.

Ultimate resilience

If ultimate reliability is your goal, you shouldn't rely on any one communication system — build redundancy into all of them. You could back up a hosted VoIP solution with an analogue, ISDN or mobile solution; equally, if you continue to use a legacy system, a hosted VoIP system makes a good backup.