Springfield, MA – October 7, 2008 – Thing5, the leader in SIP trunking and hosted PBX for the hospitality industry, announced today the complete and rapid restoration of all communications – voice and data – for two un-related properties that experienced total PBX failure.
“We received an urgent call on a Friday night from the management of a hotel in Arlington, TX,” said Thing5 operations director Alex Schroeder. “Their PBX had completely failed. Every second that phones are not working, you’re losing business. We were delighted to have them up and running again Saturday morning.” The property’s PBX, a legacy piece of phone equipment that was approximately 10 years old, had failed. To replace the unit would have cost the hotel anywhere from $45,000 to $60,000, plus annual maintenance fees. Thing5’s unique, proprietary solution allowed the hotel to keep all existing phones and wiring in place, connect to a specialized router, and restore all voice and data service. Thing5’s solution is provided for a fixed, monthly rate.
In addition to having the property’s voice services functioning, Thing5’s solution eliminates the risk of this type of communications failure occurring again. With Thing5’s hosted solution, voice and data networks are managed offsite, in a Thing5 data center that is staffed 24×7 with technicians. Thing5’s fully redundant data centers in Springfield, MA and Miami, FL provide hosted PBX, SIP trunking and voice-over-the-Internet (VOIP) service for over 1,500 properties throughout the United States. In the event of loss of power due to lightning strike or other occurrence that prevents hotel staff from answering phones, Thing5’s call routing ensures that calls are immediately transferred to central reservations, or any other call center or phone designated by the hotel.
A similar event took place at a Miami-Dade Airport, FL area hotel. The hotel’s PBX stopped working, resulting in the entire property having no ability to receive or place calls. Thng5 was able to restore their communications within 12 hours. “PBXs are old technology, and most are hidden away in a broom closet. No one pays attention to this legacy equipment until it fails – which so many are doing given that most were purchased a decade or more ago,” commented managing director Bill Faxon. “When this critical piece of equipment doesn’t function, hotels need a solution that can get them get up and running quickly. Thing5 has the only hospitality specific solution and can be rapidly deployed. Our clients can rest assured that they have the most modern technology, with better features than their legacy platform.”
Thing5’s enterprise solution utilizes burstable IP trunking; this enables on-demand sharing of under-utilized trunk capacity. Thing5 clients take advantage of its fixed rate calling, reducing their monthly telecommunications expense immediately – in most case by 40-60%.
With Thing5’s solution, applications such as voice mail, automatic call distribution, audio conferencing, faxing and instant messaging are hosted in geographically redundant data centers rather than by the clients, and delivered as managed Internet protocol (IP) services over the Web, helping to control setup and operational costs. Thing5 provides its hosted PBX platform via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Thing5’s web-based dashboard gives end-users complete control of their telephony
environment via its intuitive user interface. End-users can easily add, edit and delete phones and contacts, define and change their find-me/follow-me preferences with sequential or simultaneous ringing, manage their conference bridges and view and download call and conference reports.