Thursday’s landline outage for much of Southeast Nebraska included the city of Lincoln’s 911 service. After 935 minutes, from 7:45 AM to 11:20 PM, media outlets published alternative emergency numbers. As an IT guy for a high performance comapany, I was shocked to see this happen in several of the communities that I serve. Landline service is usually regarded as the gold standard for Five Nines service.

Due to this recent outage it will take 181 years of perfect service to reach 99.999% uptime on this system. Ironically Windstream’s website promotes Four Nines of reliability for home service with the Your Landline is your Lifeline campaign. But surely 911 service is not Four Nines, with almost an hour a year of downtime?

Our goal isn’t to be hard on a local phone company, but since many of our boardroom ideas come from enterprise server rooms, we want to see what businesses can learn.

First, it appeared as though both the primary and redundant switch were modified and then upgraded. Whether or not this was the ultimate issue, only 1 technician can tell us that, but we do know that whenever upgrading a system, we need to verify a backup (yes good switches can have backup configurations) and verify the primary before modifying the secondary.

Secondly, whenever your system demands a high level of reliability, you want to have options, whether that is rolling to an alternative site or a different telecommunications company, many small businesses are implementing backup Internet connections to keep communications a priority.

Lastly, I’m sure that in this case these were enterprise switches, but often even in larger deployments, business decision-makers overlook the impact that switches play in a business environment. Whether you are looking to prioritize traffic for a VOIP deployment or just have a more stable network, switches and other network infrastructure are key to keeping your environment stable.

Ben Pankonin