Since hurricane Ike, the home town of our parent company, Houston, TX suffered major power outages. Glad that no one was hurt, the next big thing to overcome was to find fuel to keep the generators going for weeks on end. This proved to be the tougher than we anticipated as gas stations quickly ran out of fuel and there were long lines of cars waiting to fuel up (I believe tankers full of fuel were stopped outside of town.)

Through this ordeal, we did learn some intricate details about disaster recovery.

Most companies that had services through companies like Cbeyond (who tie SIP trunks to their internet lines) were affected to some extent. The beauty of the Cbeyond circuits was that companies could login to their web control panels and forward their critical numbers to alternate phone lines that were operational. So in total disaster, you can keep working, although in a crippled mode.

This is great, but got me thinking. SIP trunks through a SIP trunk provider (that didn’t care about connectivity) would prove more beneficial as users could simply take their phone systems anywhere that had high speed internet connectivity and get back to normal business within hours if not minutes. This would have meant, no change in process and your phones ring like normal, critical for companies that take orders via phone.

Maybe Cbeyond will open up at some point and allow users to connect to their SIP trunks no matter how the user is getting to the internet, that will be an excellent capability to have during a disaster.