Skip to content This document describes the how the people, processes and technical components of our cloud phone solutions are designed and maintained to operate in the event of an environmental or technological disaster.
At CFone, we ensure that each component of our phone solution is designed and monitored to provide fault tolerance throughout. There are three technical components in a phone system each of which have some interaction with people and the environment. The three technical components are the wholesale carrier, the cloud infrastructure and the end points. We will describe how have selected suppliers and redundant capacity is built in to each component.
Whole sale carrier – MagratheaCarriers route your calls between points of presence POPS using communication links with built in failover redundancy. Our chosen carrier is Magrathea. They deliver millions of calls daily between multiple carriers such as BT, Vodafone, O2 etc.
In the event of an unrecoverable failure of a primary carrier, CFone will transfer your calls to a backup carrier.
Magrathea have invested in multiple datacentre locations (Points of Presence or POPs) for geographic diversity, each connected with resilient links so that traffic can be re-routed around the network as needed to avoid any site with issues. Each location has multiple interconnects with their carrier partners and each site consists of multiples of each piece of hardware to offer further resilience in the event of failures. The London Telehouse East Datacentre is among the most advanced, reliable and secure IT and Communications facilities in the world, with environmental control, high availability, power redundancy up to 2N+1, fire detection and suppression and multi- layer physical security systems.
In March, Magrathea supported key projects with no disruption to service or capacity concerns. The inevitable increase in reliance on voice calls to keep businesses trading, keep people in social contact and to maintain key services, meant that their network delivered 34% more traffic than usual due to COVID-19.
Magrathea are a carrier for many communication providers. It was and always will be imperative that they continue to provide network access and support to organisations such as CFone. Magrathea are in the fortunate position of being geographically diverse with a number of home workers so are already experienced with remote working practices and have tested their business continuity plan with every member of their team working remotely.
Magrathea have endeavoured to create a network that can suffer failures, either their own or that of their partners, and self-heal so as to reduce or eliminate disruption. However, it is nearly impossible to cover every possible scenario or combination of scenarios that may occur which is why there is occasionally impact for their clients.
To help manage these situations, Magrathea operate a number of monitoring systems that will alert their team in the event of issues. Through many years of adjustment and improvements they currently have a system that can intelligently determine the severity of a fault and generate an appropriate alert 24/7 to ensure prompt action. This system is constantly updated in the event of any failure which increases its reliability and effectiveness.
Magrathea’s alerting system collects a large volume of data about each of their systems. Their technical support team review this continually to try to anticipate where they may suffer an issue. For example, some hardware will give performance reports ahead of a breakdown, enabling Magrathea to schedule repairs or replacements before any impact is caused for their clients.
Similarly, they collate data about their partner interconnects which shows where links are flapping or there are recurring issues and they can remove those from routing while the issue is reported and investigated therefore removing the risk of problems with calls.
Magrathea’s network handles millions of minutes a day destined for UK and International numbers via their selection of interconnected carrier networks. Each network in turn will use a number of other carriers to get the calls to the end user. Any call, particularly international, is likely to pass through multiple networks and therefore there are a number of potential points of failure.
Magrathea take a number of steps to prioritise quality and consistency of call connections.
First of all, there is the live re-routing which takes place automatically. For every outbound call they place, Magrathea have three carriers in the routing. If the first fails, their system will, within milliseconds, try the second and then the third. This means that if one of their carriers is having difficulties with a particular destination, Magrathea are very likely to get the call through on an alternative route.
The next stage is an automated report which is generated daily and then checked by their team to review the performance of every destination around the world. By taking into account the number of calls, average call duration and average answer rate, Magrathea are able to make assumptions about how well the routing is performing and carry out manual tests.
This manual testing helps Magrathea understand if any of the carriers currently in the routing are regularly failing over to the second and third choices and therefore needs removing while they investigate further. It also helps Magrathea to see if their three choices are generally all underperforming and if they need
to swap in a different carrier to the mix. Or, as is often the case if there is any kind of national disaster, if all carriers are performing badly, Magrathea are able to put the destination on the best possible route and notify their clients of potential service issues.
As well as interconnects between Magrathea and their chosen tier one carriers, inbound call handling is reliant on their internal network being able to process all the calling and billing activities. Magrathea run multiple systems on multiple sites to reduce reliance on any one bit of hardware.
Fundamental to being a responsible and legally compliant network is to provide and manage resilience and stability. All networks face the same challenges outlined above so it ultimately comes down to what resources and steps a chosen carrier can put in place to manage them.
Magrathea were selected because they concentrate almost exclusively on network monitoring, maintenance and growth meaning they have every motivation to keep services up and running to the greatest extent possible.
Of course, we understand that any failure is one too many in the eyes of our customer and their users, but it is unrealistic to think that any network can be 100% fault free. Therefore, we partnered with Magrathea because they focus their efforts on prompt response times, learning from each occurrence to build a better network, improving the monitoring systems and concentrating on providing the best possible level of communication to their clients to help them manage any issues they experience.
Magrathea have carried out a full review of all of their key functions to ensure that they have adequate back up cover in each area if the worst should happen and some members of the team were unable to work due to ill-health.
Cloud Infrastructure – CFone, Asterisk and AmazonThe Cloud infrastructure hosts each customer’s phone system (PBX). The phone systems run in Asterisk technology. Asterisk has over 1 million installations and is deployed in over 150 countries worldwide. Each of our Asterisk virtual servers are hosted in UK hosted Amazon datacentres.
We use Server monitoring tools to alert if or when a server has a fault. When a fault occurs, we use Amazon’s “Route 53” technology to switch to the standby server automatically and (almost) seamlessly if the primary server fails. This takes up to 1 minute and the customer does not need to take any action to maintain continuity of service. Amazon Route 53 is a widely used cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give our customers’ businesses an extremely reliable and cost-effective way to route their calls to backup destinations in order to maintain business continuity.
All the customers VoIP devices will establish a connection to the standby server automatically and with no customer interaction necessary.
In extremely rare circumstances, we will provision a new telephone system server manually and restore a backup copy of the customer’s system configuration to the replacement server. This process normally takes less than four hours.
Our alerting system tells us if a customer begins abusing the system and dialling premium or international calls fraudulently. It’s best practice to perform these measures to ensure there is no disruption of service or shock billing.
End Points – Smart Phones and Yealink Desk PhonesThe end points are the smart apps, soft phones and physical Yealink hardware our customers routinely use to make or receive calls 24/7 worldwide.
CFone partnered with Counterpath, because their award-winning Bria Enterprise softphones are best-in-class, with a hard-earned reputation for offering the highest quality of any softphones on the market. The platform has been developed for enterprise customers with thousands of users. Employees gain full access to voice, corporate directory, no matter where they happen to be.
Bria smart phones and soft phones are centrally managed using Counterpath’s Stretto Platform. With this, services such as centralised provisioning, push notifications, advanced analytics, and collaboration can be administered from anywhere with an Internet connection. This means that employees simply need to download the free Bria Enterprise app and log in with their corporate credentials, at which point they can immediately start communicating. Bria Enterprise is certified to interoperate with our Asterisk platforms.
If an end user has a problem with their smartphone app or soft phone client, all Bria Enterprise users are configured with Softphone Troubleshooting Logs. This helps any remote administrators to quickly pinpoint end user issues. Bria Enterprise includes Remote Debugging Tools, that allows any administrator to remotely access the employee’s mobile softphone, to update specific settings and place test calls. This feature can only be enabled in real time with the user’s consent.
In March the number of Bria end users successfully deployed increased by over 2300% from February 2020. Our support team are all set up to work from home or our office since March, so we are in a good position to continue supporting our customers throughout the next lockdown.
CFone selected Yealink, because they are one of the top 3 VoIP/SIP phone suppliers in the IP communication industry. With a worldwide market in more than 140 countries, the company has also established a first-class international service network of which, CFone are proud to be a part.
Yealink is totally committed to the pursuit of excellence and has passed more than 80 compatibility tests, meeting certification requirements set by leading VoIP system and platforms. Yealink works in close partnership with T-Mobile, Telefonica, Portugal Telecom and other leading telecommunication service providers.
CFone supply directly from Yealink UK, meaning we have access to over £17million pounds worth of UK stock including MS Teams certified equipment from Yealink. This close relationship means CFone can deliver the stock needed when its needed, anywhere in the UK.
CFone have considered the potential risk associated with a potential wider outbreak of COVID-19 and have the following processes in place to deal with any resulting impact.
The first stage of our approach is to try and keep our team fit and well. As a business we very rarely require our team to travel outside of the UK anyway but will not be authorising any non-critical overseas business travel for the foreseeable future. In addition, we will be advising staff against personal travel to any region listed in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office list of destinations with specific concerns due to Coronavirus.
Our team have been reminded to take particular care over health and hygiene in the office and when travelling on public transport and all sensible and proportionate controls are in place to monitor the health of the team and their exposure outside of the work environment.
In the event that any staff are required to self-isolate all essential staff are equipped to continue their role from home and therefore the business can continue to function as normal. The only obvious impact to clients during such a period would be the cancellation of any face to face meetings or events and any non-essential datacentre work would also be postponed. If a datacentre visit became essential, a large number of our team are capable of attending or we can use ‘remote hands’ on site. However, our carriers and choice of suppliers has been designed to reduce to the greatest extent possible the necessity for physical presence on site.
The CFone team is geographically spread with semi-permanent home-workers and therefore the risk of the entire team being impacted by the virus is minimal. In the event of a high number of people being unable to work CFone will notify our customers that our usual timescales for dealing with any non-critical requests will be extended to accommodate the reduced resource.
Priority will ALWAYS be given to the smooth running of existing services and products.
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