Internet Down, Phones Still Ringing: A North Carolina Business Owner’s Guide to Phone Outage Planning

In forty-eight years of putting technology into North Carolina businesses, I have learned that the phone system nobody thinks about is the one that decides how a bad day goes. Every owner I meet asks some version of the same question: if my phones run over the internet, what happens to my business when the internet is gone? The short answer is that your desk phones stop, your business number does not, and whether a customer reaches a human in between depends on decisions you make on a normal Tuesday, not on the morning the fiber gets cut. This guide...