Phones again

The other approach is to get an ATA and plug the current base station into that.

Yes, as long as the internet outside your place stays up. Not all do during a long outage.

All you need is an ATA and that is what they are called.

Most VOIP providers can provide that number.

Are you sure that your router doesn't support your existing phone base station?

My Zen supplied Fritz router allows a analogue phone or my dect phone/answerephone to be plugged in to make or receive VOIP calls. Alternatively the router can also provide an answerphone facility and and can communicate directly with dect handsets*.

You can get phones as you describe, or alternatively get adapters that do voip on one "side", while looking like a POTS phone socket on the other.

(you can also get routers that have the voip and DECT support built in, so they become the base station for the DECT handsets)

One thing to watch with a UPS is that many in effect have a minimum load below which you don't get any more run time, i.e. they will run down just running their inverter, even without much external load.

There are a heap of VoIP compatible phones, and they can be used in quite a number of different ways - from just talking directly to a SIP[1] account, to interfacing with "hosted" or cloud based phone system like 3CX or Centrex that will give you fluid roaming of service between devices like physical voip phones, mobiles, softphones etc. (i.e. someone can dial you "home" number and it can ring phones there or you can elect to have it ring your mobile etc, plus all the normal business style tricks you get with your own PABX, like transferring calls to other people, conference calls etc.

Which makes sense, no point in installing a copper based system ready to be turned off in a couple of years.

Yup that is quite doable.

If that's real POTS and not fake POTS, you should keep that service. POTS was invented in an era when people cared about reliability.

My VOIP here, the pedestal at the corner has no backup power. Even if I had a whole-house UPS say, it would not make a bit of difference to me getting dial tone.

The equipment in my networking tree, uses 17W continuous. That's the power which helps provide VOIP service for me. The power usage for my POTS phone in the past, was "zero". A couple pen cells to run the piezo ringer, which would last for years.

Paul

VoIP isn't exactly the answer to power cuts, it relies on *more* powered kit inside and outside your house, not less ... rig some shutters on a tilley lamp and encourage your neighbours to learn morse!

Or a CB radio in your car. ;-) Only half joking really?

Tim

Its all very well having VOIP but you are still dependent on (a) power and (b) your broadband connection staying up

When it comes to emergency telecoms backup:

My wife and I both have mobiles but on different networks, and both support tethering for laptops/tablets/Ipads.

You could keep handy some cigar lighter socket to smart phone charging leads (assuming you do have a vehicle with fuel in tank)

And

Some PAYG SIM cards, You cab get these for like 99p and I have new unused sims for EE, 3, Voda and O2. That will give you some backup against a mobile network outage.

even if you have no credit on the SIM card, teh provider's home site is still available so you can buy top up credit with a debit or credit card.

If you happen to have a laptop, then if your smart phone supports tethering, andf you have a 12V car charger for said laptop, then thats useful if you need to access weather reports or status updates for utilities etc or news.

If you happen to have a router like my Vodafone router which has a USB port, on some of them you can add a 4g USB dongle with a 6ft USB extension lead.

The idea being that if fibre/ADSL/VSDL etc goes down, the router will switch over to the 4g mobile dongle for back up internet.

The reason for the 6ft USB extension cable is so that you can position the dongle for best signal quality & reception rather than be behind a router right next to its Wi Fi aerials.

I believe the BT HomeHubs will send out a 4g EE dongle if you lose your BT broadband so if you've got BT Homehub and had a recent internet outage, you could ask BT to send you one for the next time.

Be warned though, you will need power back up for the router if you go down the 4g dongle route unless you use said 4g dongle in your laptop.

As noted by John Rumm, an UPS wont last longer on a reduced load so some means of power backup designed to last several days not a bad idea.

Theres always a Honda Inveter genny or you could use a leisure battery on a trickle charger with suitable dc-dc converters given that routers, ipads and mobile phones have fairly low popwer consumption and they run off wall warts rather than actualy needling main voltage to power them.

What will a laptop do that a modern smartphone won't? (Well, perhaps connect reliably to usenet using a decent news client!), but other than that, and using much less power to do it, a smartphone will do it all and more with dedicated apps, or its own browser.

Much bigger screen for starters.

Thats not true either. Sure, less choice with the client.

That's wrong too.

Go on then, name a *decent* Usenet client for a phone.

Tim

and much bigger keyboard for 2nd starters

and a mouse for 3rd starters... (unless you have one of those smart pens for a smart phone.

Some laptops actually come with a SIM slot liek some IBM Thinkpads.

All my current iPads also support a SIM card too.

So what? We're talking about a short-term use for a broadband connection (copper or fibre) which has gone down. Not watching a 3-hour movie or typing the complete works of Shakespeare. I said "do" not "have".

You mean something like PiaoHong? Good luck with that.

Care to elaborate, or are you just trolling?

Power cuts should be so rare even in dodgy rural locations like mine that a couple of days without working DECT phones shouldn't be too much of a burden. However, VOIP is almost certain to fail in a power cut if you are on ADSL since you are then reliant on the cabinets having power. Their battery backup is only good for an hour or two. Likewise unpowered mobile base stations went down like nine pins t about 6 hours in. Mobile phones then really struggled to work and chewed into their batteries.

Full fat fibre might be robust for a while depending on how well supplied with backup power the main exchange hosting the rack is.

DECT base stations are typically 5-10W - not all that frugal.

Basically you get a new number or can port your existing number onto the service and then plug a suitable VOIP phone into your router on the port marked "phone". It is that simple.

If there is FTTP then there will be BT provision for a basic rate phone service using VOIP over the fibre. They will try and up sell her to at least the minimum 36Mbps internet service though.

I am waiting to see how they deal with the more retro situation in my village of old codgers who see no reason to use the internet and only have the most basic wired POS phone. SOme of them still on the ancient wired soap bar style junction box.

We are *ALL* migrating to "Digital Voice" soon which is BT's brand for VOIP shortly. Vulnerable users will be sold a battery backup apparently for ~£50 (but they are completely out of stock).

Rolling it out in rural areas first strikes me as crazy...

Did you mean VDSL? The ADSL DSLAM is nice and cosy in the exchange with all those batteries and the generator.

This really IS something we should only half-joke about. In the recent storms, with the resultant power cuts and phone and internet outages, we have been woefully ill-equipped to have access to any form of emergency communications - even if relatively limited.

Everything. Smartphones are totally useless for any sort of user interaction. The touch screen is the worstof all possible input devices.

Yes. A Typo on my part. I *meant* V but typed A in error.

One thing to be aware is that consumer 'VOIP' comes in roughly two flavours:

A VOIP service from your ISP (eg 'BT Digital Voice'), as presented on the phone socket on your router, is typically so locked down that you can't get at the 'VOIP' part of it. Your ISP won't tell you the login credentials, so you can't use your own VOIP hardware. It only comes out of your router as traditional analogue phone, so any box you plug in has to speak that (eg a normal DECT base).

A proper VOIP service from a third party company, or from a few enlightened ISPs (eg Andrews and Arnold) runs over any kind of network and is completely independent from your router - you just set up your credentials and then program whatever hardware you want.

The tricky bit is when it comes down to numbering. To begin with, everyone's number was attached to a physical copper phone line. If you want to move the number to a VOIP company, it causes the broadband connection to be cancelled. There are sometimes workarounds for this, in limited circumstances.

If you're on FTTP you have no landline at all and your phone number is entirely virtual, so you can port it to a VOIP provider. I'd recommend doing that - there's no reason to buy phone and broadband from the same company any more, just like you shouldn't get email from your broadband provider.

If you're on FTTC you can either have the number attached to the copper line, or to the ISP's 'digital voice' product. If the latter then in theory you can port out the number to a third party VOIP provider without ceasing the line, but I don't know the current state of play for that.

So what I've done is have two numbers: one for the physical landline that stays with the ISP, and only used for incoming calls, and one for VOIP (incoming and cheaper outgoing calls). This is on the Gigaset N300A-IP box that has both ethernet and PSTN-in ports, with DECT handsets registered against it.

Start at some providers: Sipgate, Voipfone, Andrews and Arnold. They will offer the VOIP equivalent of a landline: a UK number (that you rent for £0-2 a month), a server to connect to, a tariff (Xp/min to ...), and possibly bundles (unlimited UK calls). All you need then is some hardware (or an app) configured with the settings for their SIP server - which they can probably sell you.

See the above. Also companies like Vonage offer a 'landline-equivalent' service (monthly line rental and a box to plug in to your router) although not always the best value.

Theo

Such communications were pretty useless anyway. Northern Powergrid might as well have used a tape announcement for Arwen to the effect of:

"Our emergency call handling team works 9-5 Monday to Friday go away"

That was pretty much the message. They dropped almost all calls after lf hour and playing their completely uninformative and in the case of my village *entirely wrong* outgoing message about current status.

There seemed to be no-one there who understood the basics of how to put together a time stamped informative message about status nor any mechanism to inform them that their "information" was incorrect.

Messages that referred to "now" were particularly unhelpful. I guess non of them had been on any appropriate training courses for their job.

The guys on the ground were doing their best in very difficult weather conditions but the office staff was totally unreliable and they had no felxibility to take householders word for it that the entire village was without power and insisted on testing everything from the house outwards. By the time they got as far as the village it was after midnight so the streetlamps would normally be off.

It struck me as crazy that they didn't have a simple non-contact way to test whether the obvious HT lines were hot.

They were horribly confused by the number of farms and businesses with their own near silent generators too :( (caused by inadequacy/unreliability of available supply)