Converged Networks Threat (Was: Level3 Outage)

Wed Feb 25 18:11:03 UTC 2004

At 10:52 AM 2/25/2004, you wrote:

>recommendation come out regarding VoIP calls.  How long until a simple
>power failure results in the inability to place calls?

We're already at that point.  If the power goes out at home, I'd have to 
grab a flashlight and go hunting for a regular ol' POTS-powered phone.  Or 
use the cell phone (as I did when Bubba had a few too many to drink one 
night recently and took out a power transformer).  But I do have a few old 
regular phones.  How many people don't?

Interactive Intelligence, Artisoft and many others are selling businesses 
phone systems that run entirely on  a "server" that may or may not be 
connected to a UPS of sufficient capacity to keep the server running during 
an extended outage.  These systems are frequently handling a PRI instead of 
POTS lines, so there's no backup when the UPS dies.  One the "phone server" 
goes down, no phone service.

VOIP services have the same problem.  Lights go out, that whiz-bang 
handy-dandy VOIP phone doesn't work, either.

Sure, we talking about the end user, not the core/backbone.  But the answer 
to the question, strictly speaking, is that a simple power outage can 
result in many people being unable to make a simple phone call (or at best, 
relying on their cell phones... assuming the generator fired at their 
nearest cell when the lights went out).