A study commissioned by VoIP provider Inclarity and conducted by YouGov among workers in the United Kingdom found that up to 60% of those polled had, during the previous year, had experienced a full day’s disruption of their company’s phone system. And according to SC Magazine UK, telephone downtime costs UK businesses around £14,000 each day, or, with the current exchange rate, about three billion U.S. dollars per minute.

Worse still, 61% of respondents didn’t have, or weren’t aware of, a disaster recovery or business continuity plan in the event of phone service problems. Considering that kind of money, it is extremely important to have a backup plan for the phones, be able to isolate performance issues, and speed recovery times. Because the only thing worse than one day without phone service is multiple days without phone service. Or baby cheetah murder. I suppose baby cheetah murder is worse.

VoIP is sensitive to latency and jitter, and anything that interferes with either latency or jitter will create bottom-line impacting problems. Now think about all the possible things that can increase latency or cause jitter either within your network or outside of your control. Sobering thoughts, huh?

Monitoring VoIP performance and being warned before problems impact the bottom line is very important, but sometimes, things like hurricanes, tornadoes, backhoes, and little kids pushing the bright shiny red button will happen. it always helps to have a backup plan in place of some sort of catastrophic failure.