Packet8 has Major Outage, Redundancy & Sky Diving

Hosted VoIP like all technology is not perfect

I am hearing and reading that Packet8 has experienced a major outage today in both the business and residential VoIP services divisions. In July of last year, Packet8 had a major outage that largely affected their residential customers. During the summers outage Packet8 was able to fail over their business customers to their residential service. The residential customers were not so fortunate.

It is easy to bash Packet8 because they are having an outage today. Customers of any VoIP provider should be aware that while the technology is very stable, it is not 100% reliable, nothing is 100% reliable. If it is really important that your phone system be 100% reliable (i.e. hospital, police etc), then you should build redundancy into your system.
Redundancy adds to the cost of operating your system and given the current economic climate, most companies are unwilling or unable to pay for redundancy.

VoIP outages generally don't last that long and they have become less frequent. If you can't live with even the smallest outage then build redundancy into your system, otherwise hope the outage does not last too long.

In some fields 100% redundancy is a must, Sky Diving is one that comes to mind.