When evaluating a business phone system, decision-makers often focus on flashy features. However, those “bells and whistles” offer zero value if the system goes down.
Instead, decision-makers should focus on reliability first. A reliable phone system ensures business continuity, protects revenue and preserves customer trust.
Frequent outages or disconnects frustrate employees and damage brand credibility. Even minor audio degradation or intermittent connection drops can cause companies to lose money silently over time without realizing their infrastructure is falling.
Determining the reliability of a phone system requires an understanding of essential uptime metrics. Organizations should also look for core backup features that prevent downtime. Cloud-based and hybrid phone systems each have distinct criteria to consider.
Essential Uptime Metrics to Evaluate
When assessing a business phone provider, organizations should first look for service level agreements (SLAs). With 99 percent uptime, an organization should expect up to 3.65 days of annual disruption. The 99.999 percent or “five nines” standard allows for only 5.26 minutes of downtime per year.
Other infrastructure standards indicate stability. The mean opinion score rates voice quality on a scale of 1 to 5. A score of 4.0 or higher indicates clear, business-grade audio. The provider should also maintain jitter under 30ms and packet loss below 1 percent to prevent choppy conversations.
The provider should operate multiple, physically separated data centers. If a natural disaster strikes one facility, phone system traffic automatically shifts to another data center without dropping active calls.
How a Hybrid Phone System Maximizes Reliability
A hybrid phone system can provide greater reliability than a cloud-based system. It combines on-premises hardware with a cloud service provider. This architecture establishes local survival capabilities that protect against Internet downtime.
If the main Internet connection goes down, a purely cloud-based system stops working. A hybrid system instantly routes inbound and outbound calls through a primary rate interface circuit connected directly to the physical building.
Employees inside the building can still dial each other’s extensions and transfer calls internally during an Internet outage. The local gateway manages internal routing without needing to reach the cloud.
Internal call quality does not rely on public internet bandwidth or external server performance. Local traffic stays on the LAN, protecting voice communication from external network congestion.
What to Look for in a Cloud-Based System
If an organization chooses a cloud-based system, reliability depends on the provider’s infrastructure and network design. Because there’s no local hardware to handle routing, organizations must evaluate how the provider prevents and handles downtime.
The provider should host their platform in multiple, geo-redundant Tier 4 data centers. The provider should also connect to multiple Tier 1 network carriers. If a major internet backbone goes down, calls automatically switch through an alternative carrier.
SLAs should promise at least 99.999 percent uptime and offer meaningful financial refunds if they miss that target. Organizations should look for a public status page showing historical incident reports and uptime metrics for specific features.
How Mitel Ensures Reliability
Many vendors build phone systems exclusively for the public cloud. Mitel systems are deployment agnostic. The company’s strategy revolves around building “five nines” core control resilience into the calling fabric, whether hosted in a public cloud, a private data center or a hybrid deployment.
Mitel treats hybrid deployments as a deliberate strategy for mission-critical sectors such as healthcare, finance and manufacturing. The MiVoice Business framework ensures automatic calling survivability for remote sites if the main WAN or cloud connection fails.
For fully hosted scenarios, Mitel decouples the core call handling software from specific infrastructure limitations to isolate failures. Mitel-hosted services distribute call traffic dynamically across multi-tenant, geographically separated data centers. If an unexpected power grid failure or natural disaster strikes one data center, active communication routes auto-recover via alternate sites.
How Verteks Can Help
Verteks is a longtime Mitel partner with the expertise to design and implement Mitel systems. Our team will assess your environment and help you select the right solution to meet your needs and budget. Contact us to schedule a no-obligation consultation and learn more about Mitel reliability.
