Short answer
Yes. The free backup SIP trunk applies when you also take FirstNet connectivity, but standalone SIP customers can add a backup trunk as a separate line item. For the most critical sites, FirstNet can also design dual-carrier diversity with documented failover.
In detail
The three continuity levels:
- Single primary trunk: suits single-site or non-critical voice where moderate downtime is an accepted risk.
- Primary plus backup trunk: if the primary loses signalling, calls reroute to the backup automatically with no manual intervention. Free with FirstNet connectivity, chargeable without it.
- Dual-carrier diversity: for high-availability contact centres, treasury operations and mission-critical medical sites that genuinely need multi-vendor diversity.
Both primary and backup trunks run on FirstNet's dual PortaOne clusters with zero-downtime updates.
Bear in mind that a backup trunk protects against a trunk failure, not against an outage on your own internet link. If both trunks depend on one link, that link remains a single point of failure, which is why FirstNet pairs voice with diverse connectivity such as broadband or SD-WAN where uptime matters. FirstNet's voice engineers scope the right posture for each site.
Source: FirstNet Business Voice Minutes service page →
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