That international Wacs outage broke my UC solution!

Fortunately not for me, but for some.

This week we had seen and received many reports from disgruntled consumers and businesses complaining of the disruption to connectivity service. A media release posted yesterday reported that both the Wacs and Sat-3/Wasc cables providing international connectivity from South Africa to international markets were knocked out on Thursday, causing slow connections for businesses and consumers.

If you're wondering what this has to do with Unified Communications (UC) or voice services, you should know that not all the UC services that you consume are based in South Africa, even though you may purchase or pay a local supplier for these services. In almost all cases, there are multiple servers and providers, each of which is connected via IP/Data links, and if there is an international component which just so happened to have relied on any of the cables which broke this week, you would have been left with degraded service, if any service at all.

Architecturally speaking, it isn't always necessary for international providers to have local infrastructure, I mean, not all parts of your UC service are latency-sensitive, but, media/voice is, so there is a risk therein if your business relies on voice or video as a mission-critical business service which has an international component to it.

Here are a few quick examples of services which may be affected by international connectivity outages, depending on your ISP and provider, of course:

• Your business makes and receives international calls or your Voice provider has no local infrastructure for UC voice (or certain services) which your business uses
• You connect to international voice/video/web servers, like UC services from Zoom or Microsoft Teams
• Your local office is part of an international organisation where all of your data services are controlled and provided through a central/global hub, so you do not use any local internet breakout services

If any of these apply to you, or if you want to make a more educated decision the next time you're looking at UC providers, this is what you do... ask under what condition/s, or in which case/s, do you stand to experience a disrupted or degraded UC service?

If the answer you get is something like "that largely depends on how your business connects to us" then I would recommend you unpack that just a bit more and get into the finer details on how everything fits together.

Work to understand that picture by asking these questions:

• Can I see a full network diagram of your services, and can you clarify how my business fits into that picture?
• Which elements of your service is hosted within South Africa, and which are hosted outside of South Africa?
• What is the relationship and/or call flow between all these servers or services which make up the solution my business will be using from you?
• What Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity measures do you have in place to mitigate any risks in your network? 
• What connectivity, redundancy and Service Level Agreement do you have between all connected servers and interconnected partners?
• What is the committed Service Level Agreement between your business and mine, measured by connection quality, speed, and uptime, and then in the manner in which you will support my business for any support matters?

Sure, with the many Public cloud options available and that fact that we're getting more and more international services hitting our shores, the world is getting smaller. However, that doesn't mean that businesses do not need to take the time to understand the different service provider offerings available and make an educated and informed decision not based on price but based on business requirement, future strategy and more importantly, the impact of the problem you are trying to solve or avoid.

Have anything you wish to add to the list? I welcome your comments or contribution.