PhoneGnome Customers Can Breathe Easy 

PhoneGnome customers can relax. The feared service interruption that users were alerted to last night likely won’t materialize. And besides, if the VoIP service doesn’t work, with PhoneGnome you always have the fallback POTS.

Yesterday evening, the company sent out a notice that one of its providers was shutting down operations on August 31 — TelEvolution deserves credit for coming out with the information before customers experienced problems. Because this provider hosted a significant part of TelEvolution’s traffic, the development could have had a massive impact on the VoIP provider.

Today it’s looking like the worst can be averted.”Other partners are stepping up and it’s looking like it’s only going to be a minor disruption, if that,” says TelEvolution CEO David Beckemeyer.

In the future, disruptions of this type will be even less likely, according to Beckmeyer.

“We’re working with a better vendor — Hurricane Electric — that offers better service guarantees. But,” he adds, “we’re paying five times as much.”

There’s a warning here for other VoIP providers, says Beckmeyer. “The way the industry is set up, individual companies can pull the rug out from under you overnight. A lot of VoIP players are one step away from the same thing.”