Thursday, September 3, 2009

The Problem with POTS

POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service - for the kids) is often viewed as the only continuously reliable source of voice service. Fundamentally, I don't disagree. However, we just experienced a week-long outage on a line - probably due to an "upgrade."

Long story short, we returned from a short trip and found a lot of AC hum on one of our residential lines. After a good deal of troubleshooting, it became fairly obvious that the problem was coming from the telco.

Customer service: It took from Friday evening until Thurday morning before a repair person showed up sunce it was a residential service. THANK GOODNESS we had a second line! At the same time, a large crew was deployed in the neighborhood "upgrading" the pedistals in order to offer TV service.

Technical solution: Took the tecnician less than an hour. Turns out that the pair was grounded somewhere between the pedistal and the demarc. (Most likely due to the "upgrade" at the pedistal.) So far as I know, since a spare pair was available, the service was simply switched to another pair.

Moral of the story: Would VoIP have been any better or worse? Verdict it out. But at least there are multiple options for Internet access...

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