Hurricane Sandy Statement

[VOIPoTim]

Here is what you should know as it relates to VOIPo and Hurricane Sandy....

First, I'd like to let all of our customers impacted by the storm know that you are in our thoughts and we are here to help you with your VOIPo service in any way that we can. In the early days of VOIPo, we went through Hurricane Ike in Houston so we have some idea of what you might be experiencing even though it seems that this storm will be much more damaging.


No Direct Service Impacts

We do not expect any direct impact on VOIPo services from the storm.

1) VOIPo employees are located in Southern California and Texas so our staff is not impacted and we'll be open normally.

2) VOIPo equipment is located in secure, highly-redundant data centers in Texas. We do not have any equipment in the storm area.

3) We have been in touch with our primary carrier partners that do have equipment or servers in the impacted areas. Based upon the information communicated to us, we believe that they are all well prepared to ride out the storm. All are executing disaster recovery plans at this time. Our primary carrier partner that carriers the bulk of our traffic that does have equipment in NYC has confirmed that backup power equipment and generators were tested today, large amounts of fuel is on hand and guaranteed re-fueling contracts for additional fuel are in place. At this time, they do not anticipate any interruption in their facility. As a precautionary measure, they are re-routing most traffic to their west coast backup facility. This could cause some slight voice quality issues for some users on the east coast.

Overall, VOIPo is not directly impacted, our partners in the path of the storm are well-prepared, and we don't expect any direct VOIPo service issues.


Indirect Service Impacts

Although we do not anticipate any disruptions in VOIPo service itself, it is still possible that customers in the impacted areas may experience isolated problems for a variety of reasons due to the nature of VoIP and telecom. While these are not within our control and will mostly be isolated to customers in the storm's path, we feel it's important to make everyone aware of them.

1) Ultimately all calls at some point have to connect to the regular telephone network outside of VOIPo. If telecom network equipment in your area (or that serves your phone number) is damaged, it could impact your service.

2) If you experience internet or power outages, your service will be impacted.

3) Since VoIP services rely on the internet, disruptions to internet service on a broader scale may cause issues if your connection to us takes a path over an ISP experiencing issues. Internet routing in the impacted areas is likely to be extremely messy and congested for a while.

4) Calls to and from the impacted areas are likely to be sporadic due to the variety of localized issues and damage to telecom equipment in impacted areas and general telecom network congestion due to various outages and increased call volume.

5) Many major carriers have closed business offices on the east coast for the time being and they are unable to process number transfer requests that we submit to them. This may cause delays for number transfers and number activations.

If you are in an impacted area or are trying to call an impacted area, please know that service will be sporadic for the above reasons.


Impacted Customers

For our customers that are impacted by the storm, we understand that the storm may create incredibly difficult situations for you. We are prepared to help you if you need special handling, policy waivers, or financial assistance (such as delaying payments).


Further, since some customers may not be able to contact us due to the conditions in their area, I have directed our billing team to relax policies and temporarily stop any payment related accounts suspensions for customers in the impacted states for the time.

The bottom line is that we are here for you and if you need something related to your VOIPo service, please let us know and we'll do our best to help you out.

Questions

If you have any questions, please contact support@voipo.com for assistance. If you are impacted and need something special done and cannot get it done through our support team, please ask them to escalate your ticket to Tim and I'll personally try to help.

This is obviously a dynamic and changing situation. If anything changes from what I've posted above, I will update everyone.