On July 2, 2019 the unthinkable happens for many Internet customers in the Charleston metro area. Century Link reports that a fiber optic cable servicing parts of the southeastern United States was damaged. This affected local Internet Service Providers (ISP), WOW, Comcast, and Verizon. Customers were out of service for up to 12 hours.

​It is important for businesses to protect themselves from significant Internet downtime.  The obvious

A question that I often field from customers during our Hosted PBX deployments is: "Can the phone ring differently when receiving an internal call?" This is called distinctive ring, a feature that is available for most premise based systems. For our typical deployments we use Yealink T4X series phones because of their durability and feature set. Yealink T4X phones allow for distinctive ring not just for internal calls but distinctive ring based on a local directory. This directory can be configured through the phone itself or it can be provisioned to each phone being deployed. Typically we use the second option -- this allows for a consistent user experience, all the phones on the site work the exact same way. In this post I will explain how to add numbers to this directory from your phone as well as detail the process for provisioning a directory to all phones for other VOIP installation professionals.