The Inbound platform is engineered across two geographically diverse locations in our London and Manchester pops in a load share configuration. Each location consists of a collection of Resilient High Availability servers – for example; Call Recording servers, IVR servers, Voicemail servers, Queuing servers etc – and there are no single points of failure.
The concurrent call capacity within the platform is maintained at a lever well above our peak busy hours traffic and each location can run the service independently in the unlikely event of a failure at either.
Gamma has achieved ISO22301 certification (for Business Continuity) and as part of our continuous service improvement we carry out regular rehearsals of the DR capabilities within the platform architecture to ensure they are still fit for purpose.
The platform is architected to maintain 99.99% availability and we consistently exceed this figure.
Currently we’re carrying approximately 300 million business minutes per month across hundreds of thousands of Inbound numbers.
Managing network congestion #
We run comprehensive monitoring and capacity planning management programmes for all Gamma voice services including the Inbound platform. A monthly forum is held to review infrastructure and technical requirements to meet demands and growth. We also run cyclical programmes to review upcoming mass call events to ensure scale and scope are fully understood, this includes the review of traffic measures required during such events to protect the integrity of all operator networks involved in the end to end traffic flow. Gamma works collaboratively with other UK operators to manage mass calling events as and when they occur.
Our capacity planning rules for interconnect and core switching environments ensure we have enough headroom to accommodate such events. Our defined processes cater for both known events – such as University Clearing – and unplanned events.
During a mass call event we may engage additional monitoring of traffic flows and volumes across the network. We are able to deploy traffic shaping and gapping tools at specific locations in the network if required.