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With all the talk locally about the possibility of the Green River flooding in the Kent/Auburn area, I figure its a great time to address disaster planning regarding business phones.

Even if your office is up out of the valley floor you may have disruptions due to phone/internet services which route through flood areas, power outages, or simply have trouble getting to your office.

Power
Short power outages can of course be resolved by a battery backup, its just a matter of figuring out the power consumption of your phone system along with handsets. Modern systems from Allworx and Talkswitch consume less than 10 watts, making it easy to stay online during an outage. Keeping handsets online typically requires a PoE switch, which will draw a varied load depending on how many handsets are being powered - I recommend limiting the battery backup to only high priority handsets.

Phone Service
Traditional phone lines are highly reliable however falling trees can take down overhead lines and buried lines can become saturated during a flood. A few cheap and easy solutions for a small office include getting a voicemail box from your phone service provider and adding remote access call forwarding so you can forward lines to a home or cell phone during an outage.

SIP based phone services can often automatically reroute to a backup PBX or external phone number in an outage. This works particularly well for companies with branch offices - if one branch goes offline all calls can automatically reroute to another branch.

Internet Service
For businesses highly dependent upon internet access a backup internet connection can make a lot of sense. One mistake many businesses make is thinking two T1s from two different carriers is a backup - it doesn’t protect against problems like flooded lines, flooded central offices, or down utility lines/poles. Fixed wireless services offer true diversity and are often less expensive than a second T1.

Inaccessible Office
The most common problem is just that the office is inaccessible - down trees, closed roads, excess snow on roads, etc can leave you with the situation of a perfectly operational office that is unreachable. Having a phone system which can be remotely reconfigured to route calls to cell phones or having remote IP phones enables staff to continue to work from home as though they were in the office.

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