How to Stop Losing $1,250/Hour When Your SIP Trunk Goes Down

Your primary SIP carrier goes down during peak dialing hours. Fifty agents are sitting idle. At a fully loaded cost of $25/hour per agent, you're burning $1,250 per hour in payroll alone — not counting the revenue those agents would have generated. This happens more often than you'd expect. Carriers have outages. They run out of capacity. They return 503s because their upstream route is congested. And VICIdial, out of the box, does nothing about it. The call fails, gets logged as an error, and the lead goes back in the hopper. No automatic retry through an alternate carrier. No health monitoring. No dynamic routing based on carrier performance. Here's how to build real failover at the Asterisk layer. Why VICIdial's Default Carrier Setup Fails You VICIdial's admin interface lets you define multiple carriers and assign them to campaigns. But the default behavior has three critical gaps: No automatic failover — if Carrier A returns a 503, VICIdial doesn't retry through Carrier B. The call