During carrier outages, the only option to get your numbers working again is to use an alternate carrier. It’s not in a carrier’s best interest to help you move your numbers away, as this is a revenue source for carriers, especially when most of their resources are focused on repairing the outage. In a disaster situation, your own business is your greatest advocate for a speedy recovery and without a real disaster recovery solution, this process can be difficult and time consuming.

Creating relationships with additional carriers is paramount to an effective Disaster Recovery plan. Carriers are eager to work with new businesses as they incur financial gain through new customer acquisition and billing for services rendered. A business seeking an effective toll-free disaster re- covery solution needs to establish contracts and set up networks with at least two unique carriers while getting complimentary carrier agreements in place. In the telecommunications industry, this agreement is known by different names and it depends on which carrier you are talking to. At its core, the agreement informs the carrier that you’ll be using their network with your own unique RespOrg ID. The reason this is so important is that when you port numbers in and out, carriers will see these new numbers in their network. If there is no existing agreement in place, these car- riers will scrub your numbers. This agreement establishes that your number belongs there, but under your own unique ID. It’s largely a preemptive measure, but it’s in a business’s best interest to comply.

In addition to having a secondary carrier to route your traffic to in the event of a carrier outage, you also gain the ability to split your traffic by percentage, region, and date/time. Splitting your traffic between multiple carriers brings businesses closer to the ideal least cost routing structure which will save the business money as that traffic is routed in the most cost-efficient manner based on several key, modifiable identifiers.