“The telephone network is obsolete”: Get ready for the all-IP telco (AY&T wants to screw YOU)

[jeff47]

23. Sure

VOIP means "voice over IP". It's the common acronym for IP-based telephones. IP is "Internet Protocol", the 'language' that the computers speak over the Internet.

UPS is "uninterruptable power supply". A fancy way to say "battery back-up" - a box that has a large battery to power devices if wall power goes down.

Currently, to make VOIP work you plug a conventional telephone into a box. That box plugs into your Internet service and routes your phone calls over the Internet. If that box, and the other boxes that make your Internet work, don't have power then you can't make phone calls.

POTS (plain old telephone service) doesn't have this problem because the telephone is powered by the phone company, and they have huge UPSes at their office to keep the phones working if power goes out.

What the telephone companies are proposing is to put a VOIP box on the outside of people's houses, converting their old-fashioned telephone service into VOIP service. So instead of me plugging my phone into a box, I plug the phone into the wall but it acts as if I have a VOIP phone.

Also where I am we have underground power lines and so while we lost power during our last hurricane it was the underground transformer which went out not the buried phone line. So we had phone but no power for 10 days until they got around to digging up the failed transformer.

It will depend on where exactly you live. The vast majority of the country relies on above-ground power and the telco runs their phone lines on the same poles. If you live in a dense enough city that has sufficient money to underground their utilities, then you may end up with power and phone separated as in your location.

So for most people a storm taking out the "telephone poles" take out both phone and power. Since they are the power company's poles, the power company has to fix them before the telco can fix their wires, leading to power coming back before phone. But that's kind of a moot comparison - For the vast majority, Internet service is running over those same phone lines or the cable lines on the same poles. My "emergency" phone is a cell phone, since that doesn't have to rely on wires.