Most SME phone-system contracts quote a four-hour P1 response. By the time someone rings back, half the working day is gone.
When your phones break, we pick up the phone. No ticket queue. No L1/L2/L3 escalation. A senior engineer with direct platform access answers. You describe the symptom; we look at the system. Most issues are diagnosed and addressed live on the call.
Upstream problems — your SIP carrier, your ISP, the local exchange — are worked in real time with you on the line. You stay informed; you don't wait for a status email.
Engineer engaged within minutes, 24/7 including weekends and bank holidays. Most issues are diagnosed live on the call.
One extension misbehaving, recording gap, voicemail not delivering to email. Same business day, Mon–Fri.
New extensions, dial-plan tweaks, IVR edits, hold-music swaps. Next business day.
Hosted infrastructure runs to a 99.95% uptime target.
“Phones down” means inbound or outbound calling is broken for the firm as a whole, not one user. “Call quality affecting business operations” means dropped calls, garbled audio, or echo bad enough that you can't run a billable conversation. The definition is not argued during an incident.
The exact first-response-time bounds — median and outer — are written into every signed contract. The full numeric SLA is published.
Three things break a hosted phone call: dropped packets, jittery audio, and latency past about 150ms. Most SaaS phone platforms don't publish those numbers. We measure ours.
The path is short and stays in the UK end to end. Our 3CX instances run in a London data centre. SIP trunks terminate on Gamma UK. Calls hop through a UK ISP to your office. Fewer networks on the route means fewer places for the audio to degrade.
Sub-15ms is what you'll measure from a UK desk to our platform. 15ms is well below the threshold of human perception. The audible win from a short UK-only path is fewer dropped packets and lower jitter. Calls sound clean because nothing along the route is straining.
EU-hosted or US-hosted SaaS PBXs add 20–100ms of latency and route through more networks on the way. Imperceptible on a one-side-talks-at-a-time conversation. Audible on interruption-heavy work: sales calls, support escalations, legal interview-style conversations.
Our default codec is G.711, uncompressed. The codec sets the ceiling on call quality. We don't compress to save bandwidth on UK trunks because we don't need to.
London-specific routing and where we operate from in the City is on the VoIP London page.
If your call recordings touch regulated data — client instructions for a solicitor, MiFID-relevant trading conversations, AML identity checks — your DPO has one question for you. Where does that audio actually live?
The answer for Port Phones customers: end to end in the UK. Your 3CX instance is hosted in a London data centre. Call recordings and call detail records (CDRs) are stored on UK infrastructure. SIP trunks terminate on Gamma UK. Nothing crosses a border to make a UK-to-UK call.
This matters most acutely if you're in a regulated sector. Law firms, accountancies, financial advisers, and insurance brokers handle calls that contain regulated data. The data your phone system retains is the data your sector's regulator cares about.
End-to-end UK residency removes the cross-border-transfer question from your data-protection impact assessment. Your DPO doesn't have to evaluate Standard Contractual Clauses, US Cloud Act exposure, or post-Schrems-II adequacy decisions for the phone system. The phone-system row on your DPIA is short.
One detail worth naming. We don't retain call audio or transcripts on our own infrastructure. Recordings live on your 3CX instance, in the UK data centre, accessible to your administrators, retained per your policy.
The hosting infrastructure (data centre, latency to UK ISPs, where Gamma fits in the picture) is documented on 3CX hosting in the UK.
The SLA, the UK-residency commitment, and the hosting setup all appear in the signed agreement at audit. We put standards in the contract.