Skip to main menu Home Fiber Services Equipment Support FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS 24 / 7 All of our PRI, Ethernet, T1, and Bonded DSL connections are monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If your connection goes down or has intermittent problems, an alarm notification is automatically sent to our entire technical staff, so that they are aware of the problem the moment it happens. This allows our technicians to be ready to troubleshoot and dispatch out quickly to resolve the issue and maximize your connection’s uptime. AUTOMATIC PRI FAILOVER In the event of an ISDN PRI service outage or if all the channels of the PRI are being used, our Automatic PRI Failover option will automatically route incoming calls to a backup phone number (i.e. – an analog phone line or cell phone) or to a backup voicemail box during the outage period. This gives you the ability to correspond with your customers during an outage instead of being completely cut off until service is restored. Once the PRI channels become available again or service is restored, incoming calls are automatically routed back to the PRI. NETWORK PROTOCOL OVERHEAD Every network has some degree of normal network overhead, which guarantees that you will never be able to use all of the bandwidth of any connection for data. Take as an example 10 Mbit/s Ethernet. Sure, the line may be able to transmit 10,000,000 bits every second, but not all of those bits are data! Some are used to package and address the data – data can’t just be thrown onto the network in raw form. Also, many of those bits are used for general overhead activities, dealing with collisions on transmissions, and so on. There are natural inefficiencies in any networking technology. Even beyond this, there are other overhead issues. Any network transaction involves a number of different hardware and software layers, and overhead exists at each of them, from the application and operating system down to the hardware. These overheads mean that you generally lose at least 15% of the “rated” connection speed off the top, and sometimes even more. For example, 8 Mbits/s user data throughput on a regular 10 Mbit/s Ethernet network is actually very good. This reduced speed is what is commonly referred to as “Goodput”. VOIP QUALITY OF SERVICE Voice over IP (VoIP) is a real-time protocol which means that if information is lost or delayed it will result in a noticeable drop in call quality or a complete loss of it. Symptoms of network congestion include garbled audio, dropped calls, and echo. With VoIP over the public Internet your voice traffic and regular internet traffic in your office are sharing the same internet connection. No prioritization of voice traffic over regular traffic is being performed and thus there is the high potential that voice quality could be degraded if there is insufficient bandwidth for both voice and regular traffic. Your router could be configured for Quality of Service (QoS) to distinguish between voice traffic and regular internet traffic and give the voice traffic a higher priority, but this only affects the upload traffic. If other users on your network are downloading data this will cause a noticeable drop in call quality, and a QoS enabled router cannot control this. Our Hosted service is only delivered over our local network, so it never transverses the public Internet. Using a method called Class of Service (CoS) we can prioritize the voice traffic in both upload and download directions to ensure the highest Quality of Service for your phone calls regardless of your Internet usage. More Information: HowStuffWorks – Disadvantages of Using VoIP About.com – VoIP Problems and Pitfalls Search for: RECENT POSTS ShoreTel Connect CLOUD Is On The Way! Wherever You May Be; There We Are Speed Testing Amplify employee communication Bandwidth Snake Oil FOLLOW US ON TWITTER My Tweets LIKE US ON FACEBOOK FORT WORTH 901 Bonnie Brae Ave Fort Worth, TX 76111 817-289-2650817-289-2660 AMARILLO – HQ 4176 Canyon Drive, Amarillo, TX 79109 806-350-9000806-355-0511 © 2021 PATHWAYZ COMMUNICATIONS, INC. TERMS & CONDITIONS REGULATORY INFORMATION SLA AGREEMENT PRIVACY POLICY ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY