In our frequent weather related power failures I've noted that the cell phones immediately display "no service" when I'm home. But the "Plain Old Telephone Service" line keeps going, and is useful as long as I've got a plain old telephone to plug into it. My theory is that there's an inertia that works against removing or not-maintaining any of the resilience measures that have been designed into the POTS systems, whereas the cell providers never redundant electrical power in the first place.
A few years ago everybody's land line in this area was "upgraded" to an invisibly VOIP system, and the old 50V power is gone. But at least it is separate from cell phone services and, except for area-wide power outages, their relative failures don't match.
5 comments:
Redundancy is good.
LOL. That's what your watch is for.
In our frequent weather related power failures I've noted that the cell phones immediately display "no service" when I'm home. But the "Plain Old Telephone Service" line keeps going, and is useful as long as I've got a plain old telephone to plug into it.
My theory is that there's an inertia that works against removing or not-maintaining any of the resilience measures that have been designed into the POTS systems, whereas the cell providers never redundant electrical power in the first place.
A few years ago everybody's land line in this area was "upgraded" to an invisibly VOIP system, and the old 50V power is gone. But at least it is separate from cell phone services and, except for area-wide power outages, their relative failures don't match.
@ Amazed - Oh great. One more thing to leave lying around.
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