- DID outages can still occur even if the provider soft-switch is not located in an outage area. Every provider listed in this thread has taken a hit to DID service on the east coast. You can move the SIP portion of call control pretty much anywhere with IP connectivity, but the gateway back to the TDM world has a physical location requirement.

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- Even with geographic distribution of resources, there are still single elements of failure. Notably in the VoIP market, that's going to be the accounting database. Providers need to know if you're an authorized user, and if you have funds available to complete a call. When operating multiple nodes, that means they all have to agree on customer credential and balance information. This is typically handled by either having all call processing nodes point to a central DB, or leveraging DB replication functions to distribute the DB availability. The key problem in either case would be the introduction of data corruption.

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- Depending on your provider's chosen E911 vendor, E911 services may be linked to a single point of failure.

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- I've noticed at least one provider here is using GoDaddy for domain registration. If you do a cursory google search you will find it is ridiculously easy to get a domain suspended with GoDaddy. If someone were to craft a social engineering attack for a Friday night, there is a very good chance the NS records for the domain will remain pointed to "NS1 & NS2.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM" until they can take it up with a manager in the Abuse department on Monday morning.

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Part of this thread's raison d'etre is to point out and clarify such info about common VoIP providers.

Hurricanes aside, can you imagine what would happen to a single-site provider if a fire destroyed their entire facility? they wouldn't be down for days - they'd be down for months or possibly forever. Having multiple geo locations is not about how big you are - it's about being able to remain in business when disaster strikes.

....Hurricanes aside, can you imagine what would happen to a single-site provider if a fire destroyed their entire facility? they wouldn't be down for days - they'd be down for months or possibly forever.

Having multiple geo locations is not about how big you are - it's about being able to remain in business when disaster strikes.

Technically, I could pop a PBX in a place, hook it to some sip trunks, and call it a backup CO.

This is a good thread.

Recent events have proved that users cannot rely on service reliability statements on a providers web site.

Unless they are prepared to go into detail about their network setup and redundancy plans, their sales pitches should be taken with a pinch of salt.

There is a good overview of Priority and weight at »en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record

Recent events have proved that users cannot rely on service reliability statements on a providers web site.

So it would seem that 'weight' is a sort of 'fine-tuning' for 'priority'.

....If a service has multiple SRV records with the same priority value, clients use the weight field to determine which host to use. The weight value is relevant only in relation to other weight values for the service, and only among records with the same priority value.

"Now serving number 83, number 83 please...."

Yes, 10 is a higher priority than 20.

Imagine a long queue, if you are number 10 in that queue and your friend is number 20 you will be served before your friend.

NEXT QUESTION : in the NSLOOKUP output, is 10 a higher priority than 20 ? (and so on) - Instinctively I would have expected the opposite.

And BTW, then does this observation also imply that if I am in Canada, 2 hours from Montreal, that I should specify ca.anveo.com rather than sip.ca.anveo.com ? (in my ATA)

The quality is a good as your normal VoIP. There is time where the system has failed over and I have not even notice.

I went to a GSM gateway.

How can the bottom line be anything other than, "do I have the services I paid for?"

One small observation, if you want the security of servers on three sites make sure you specify anveo.com as the proxy rather than sip.anveo.com, sip.ca.anveo.com or sip.de.anveo.com. It's the only SRV record that points to all three servers.

One example of a good recovery plan is Anveo which has three data centers, widely separated in three different countries.

The bottom line is: Does the provider have a disaster recovery plan ? ....

It sticks in the back of my mind that Vitelity is one of voip.ms DID suppliers. Is that correct?

I think counting and listing server locations is based on a noble idea, but not likely to capture or characterize the systems in a meaningful way to customers....

Good. Where is the URL of the summary?

VoIP customers are usually primarily interested in the reliability and availability of three things:

1. The ability to place outgoing calls from my phone.

2. The ability to receive incoming calls to my DID.

3. The ability to provision or make changes to account account/service.

Vitelity -- multiple facilities in the Denver area, primary facility in Englewood is owned by the company, has direct carrier interconnects with XO, Level(3)/GlobalCrossing, Paetec, and PacWest. Backup power provided by UPS and generator. There is no geographic redundancy for core call processing functions. Facility details: »www.freshnews.com/news/554904/vi···atforms-
...

this thread itself is supposed to become a summary of all of the scattered info about VoIP providers' servers and of their redundancy plans

What is the point of this thread? Where is the summary?