I haven’t seen any guidance from Microsoft and when/if they do publish something it will most likely need to be very generic and talk about the role of the PSTN provider. The answer is ultimately going to be, you will need to talk to multiple players potentially. Typically you would have two PSTN connections at each site. The first trick is to make sure they are the same provider. In many cases, this can’t be done. So in those situations you may end up having to look at a SIP provider and seeing what options they provide for failover purposes. If it is done via a SIP provider, you may just need the provider to cut over DID’s from the remote location to the primary location in the event of a failure. However, this process, depending on the provider could take time. This is where I think all of the providers fail a little bit because moving DID’s from one area to the other in a quick manor just doesn’t seem all that possible for some of them.

I know that isn’t quite the answer you were looking for but it’s the start. I think in the next few years as the industry moves further beyond the traditional PBX we will start to see other/better options.

Richard

Thank you
Suresh Tatavarthy
NET Product Management & Marketing
Suresh_Tatavarthy@net.com