Switch Telecom - Cape Town Node Failure - no apology for downtime.

We had a fair onboarding with Switch Telecom this month.

They dropped the ball on attention to detail. i.e. Did not complete the pbx deployment properly. Music on hold not working. After hours not working. etc. Voicemails not working. No email to voicemail notifications. We basically had to do that ourselves.

That's small stuff in the greater scheme of things.

Unfortunately also experienced 28 hours of downtime on inbound calls due to catastrophic router failure they experienced in Cape Town. They had no spare gear in Cape Town and don't employ technicians in Cape Town. They seem to use the remote hands supplied by the DC. Hence a full day after the incident they then fly someone down from JHB to Cape Town.

That's a bit underwhelming for an enterprise voip deployment. You have to have hot spares for your primary gear or at least a cold spare nearby. You should have a tech available in a geographic area where you have a node.

Below is the reply from their technician. No Apology to be found. As a matter of fact the company as a rule does not apologise for downtime. I reckon they would be good for home use but I would never use them for enterprise again.

" One of the main routers in Capetown experienced issues yesterday afternoon. Efforts to rectify the issue remotely with the local data centre support failed. Traffic was rerouted to other available data centres in the country. We added a Notice yesterday to identify all clients of the issues we are experiencing, this was not limited to one client but to multiple clients. One of our engineers flew to Capetown this morning to replace the faulty router, they should be still busy with it, once they are done we will update the Notice accordingly. In theory, after rerouting the traffic, calls should not have been affected however we see that some providers are still attempting to send calls to a non-existent router. This will be addressed with the respective providers to ensure that there are able to reroute traffic in the future as per the agreed terms should they be a problem in the future. "