When Every Minute Matters: Enhancing Disaster Recovery in the TFNRegistry™

When carrier outages or network disruptions occur, every minute counts. Organizations managing Toll-Free Numbers (TFNs) need disaster recovery tools that enable rapid routing changes, minimize downtime and maintain business continuity.

This is especially important for teams that manage large volumes of TFNs and need a more scalable way to respond during critical events. Through the Somos User Group, customers can share the operational challenges they face every day and help identify enhancements that make the TFNRegistry more practical, efficient and responsive to industry needs.

As part of our ongoing series on customer-driven TFNRegistry enhancements, this story highlights how feedback from ANI Networks helped shape Disaster Recovery for Templates, making it easier to manage routing changes during outages, disruptions or other emergency events.

Why Toll-Free Disaster Recovery Matters

For organizations that manage TFNs at scale, service continuity is critical. When a carrier outage, network disruption or other emergency event occurs, teams need to be able to respond quickly, reroute traffic efficiently and minimize customer impact.

That need was top of mind for ANI Networks. Jeannie DiPuccio, Senior Director of Wholesale Services at ANI Networks, shared that her organization relies on Somos solutions to support daily Toll-Free operations, including number porting, Resp Org management, routing template administration, enhanced routing, disaster recovery planning and ongoing TFN management.

Jeannie has been involved with the Somos User Group since 2016. Through that group, she said ANI Networks has had a direct channel to collaborate with industry peers, share best practices and provide feedback on products and services critical to daily operations.

The Challenge of Managing Carrier Outages

Before the Disaster Recovery enhancements in the TFNRegistry, responding to carrier outages or network disruptions often required manual updates to individual TFNs or complex routing changes. During an already critical service event, that process could be time-consuming and difficult to scale.

As a service provider managing large volumes of TFNs, ANI Networks needed a more efficient and scalable way to quickly reroute traffic and minimize service interruptions for its customers. During a disaster or emergency event, the team needed the ability to redirect Toll-Free traffic away from an impacted carrier or network and route calls to an alternate destination using a different Carrier Identification Code (CIC).

Enabling Faster, Scalable Disaster Recovery

That feedback helped shape a TFNRegistry enhancement focused on Disaster Recovery for Templates. For ANI Networks, the most important outcomes were speed, simplicity and scalability. Disaster Recovery for Templates supports those needs by giving TFNRegistry users a more efficient way to manage routing changes during a carrier outage, network disruption or emergency event.

With this capability, teams can use a preconfigured disaster recovery template to help redirect Toll-Free traffic through alternate Carrier Identification Codes (CICs). Instead of updating individual TFNs one by one, users can apply routing changes across larger volumes of numbers, reducing manual effort when time is critical.

Once the event has been resolved, traffic can be reverted back to its original routing. This ability to move traffic during an event and restore standard routing afterward directly supported ANI Networks’ needs.

Customer-Driven Innovation for the Toll-Free Industry

Now that the enhancement is available, Jeannie shared that it has transformed disaster recovery from a largely reactive process into a more proactive, controlled and operationally efficient capability.

That impact matters because disaster recovery is not only about responding to an outage. It is also about preparing for disruption, protecting continuity and giving teams the tools they need to act quickly when every minute matters.

The TFNRegistry Disaster Recovery enhancement demonstrates how customer collaboration drives practical innovation for the Toll-Free ecosystem. By simplifying routing changes during carrier outages and emergency events, organizations can improve business continuity, reduce operational complexity, and respond with greater confidence when service continuity is critical.