Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 10:46 PM EST
By: Alon Cohen
As a consumer evaluating a company that provides you with real time communication services you probably ask: who stands behind it? Are they reliable? What are their major assets that work for me? What will happen to my phone number if the company disappears one day?
Well, at Phone.com we understand that question, we would ask it ourselves.
To begin with, we promise 24*7 customer-support! Someone is always available to take our customer’s call (your call!). We will be glad to help you set up your accounts, and advise you on better ways to effectively use our services based on your needs!
We also assure our customers that they will be able to transfer their phone number to another service provider if they need to or just want to, no questions asked. To create an additional assurance we actually set up the operation in such a way that one of our partner companies (that has been in this business for more than a decade), acts as a backup, and is in fact capable not only of managing the local number portability process but it is even capable of taking over the whole back-end operation and continue without disrupting the service for one second.
On top of that Phone.com also has a state of the art data center.
We have two of those actually; the first is home grown with full intrinsic redundancy, and a second one hosted at one of the largest co-hosting facilities in the US, residing side by side with equipment from other major carriers.
Here are some technical data points that may be interesting to read about: Our home grown facility is connected via Multi-homed Gigabit Ethernet connections, it has about 300 servers at that one location.
In case of a power interruption, the electrical power is backed up by an APC UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) that can keep the system running on batteries for about 8 minutes. That is until a Katolight Generator protected from the elements in an underground concrete power generation room kicks in with fuel reserves sufficient for full 5 days, and with live refueling capabilities can sustain the data center forever.
The facility is kept cool at a temperature convenient for its inhabitants (the computers) with a redundant HVAC system that circulates the entire volume of air in the facility every 2 minutes.
In case of fire, the facility has fire protection system using FM-200 gas, with second stage
backup fire suppression. The FM-200 clean fire suppression agent is ideal for the protection of our facility which contains valuable assets that are vital to the company’s ability to conduct normal business operations. FM-200 does not harm the Ozone and has no cleanup time which eliminates costly downtime.
On top of everything the facility is secured with alarm systems and multi level access control. The flooring is Anti Static to ensure the safety of the equipment when handled by technicians.
If all the above fails from some catastrophic reason an automatic handoff to the second facility kicks in, and the operation seamlessly moves itself to the second site.
Now, how about that to ease your mind and ensure availability?
Our last (but not least) and probably the most important asset at Phone.com is our human resource! Our people, namely our Customer Support Representatives who will answer your questions 24×7, 365 days a year and who are backed by our super network operations team responsible for developing and setting up this extra resilient, monumental monster of raw computing power and smart applications software.
I personally can’t thank those people enough for doing their job as good as they do, for making sure our customers, phone systems (including my own - all from Phone.com) are all working perfectly.
Here are some of the faces of the people on this incredible team.
Thank you all!
