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Comment by ssss11 | Hacker News Reader

I’m not familiar with the company ’bandwidth’ but do find it a little funny they’re experiencing an outage.

But then I feel guilty seeing they have a 911 call service which is offline. This is really serious - I wonder what kind of tech they rely on for this, in order to even provide this service for people to rely on shouldn’t it match what major telcos need to use (in terms of resilience)?

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Bandwidth is the underlying carrier or tandem provider (path that a call routes down) for a portion of nearly all VOIP carrier's traffic. Google Voice & Microsoft Teams Voice & Conferencing entirely rely on Bandwidth.com for calling & texting.

In many ratecenters, your only choices are buying tandem transport for incoming calls from Onvoy, Bandwidth.com, Peerless Networks, West/Intrado/Flowroute or establishing your own physical presence to switch calls and paying the incumbent telco for connectivity.

Great explanation thank you!

Just like with IP traffic, companies terminate calls through multiple providers. While bandwidth might be the primary termination provider for 911 for a company, the calls can be routed through others. That backup route, however, may not have locale information so the call might have to be taken initially at a national call center so the locale can be determined, after which it is properly forwarded to the local 911 center. Not ideal since it can add precious time to getting help, but at least the call can get through.

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