Weird keyboard behavior

-=> Martin Gregorie wrote to Axel Berger They say there is battery buffered emergency supply for cellphones but I > do wonder how much that promise is worth when the chips come down.

MG> Judging by American experience over the last year or two, i.e. east MG> coast hurricanes, if current German practise is copying US Telcos that MG> promise is utterly worthless.

I think copying American telco practices (but not putting the batteries in a ground floor or below-ground basement) is probably a good object lesson.

kurt weiske | kweiske at realitycheckbbs dot org |

| 1:218/700@fidonet

... Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place

why - this is only one cable that carries both signals - the fact internet works, means the cable is OK. Why the other does not work, is to be identified by the operator. I stepped back as the indians (sorry for the term - not all of the guys are bad technicians) jumped in and the quality dropped. I hear this from all over the (western) world. I expect more of this to come in the future. You simply can not have quality and cheep, but this is how it works today. I hope they'll fix it for you

May be I am understanding something different under POTS than you guys.

Plain old telephone service, or plain ordinary telephone system, is a retronym for voice-grade telephone service employing analog signal transmission over copper loops (Wikipedia)

Notice "analog signal". Even if you have copper the last 50m or 3km - it does not mean it is POTS on it. It could be somewhere still a POTS - I never bothered to find out which operators are using what switching technology. I worked with operators in

12 EU countries with 18mil+ subscribers and last 2 (analog) DMS100 were decommissioned 5y ago. Most probably it is ISDN that you get.

No! That's the whole point. The POTS phone doesn't work if the cable has a break but the signal used by the internet connection is a fairly high frequency and the wires act as aerials and the connection will still work. I have actually experienced this myself, the POTS phone didn't work but we still had a (rather slow) internet connection.

--
Chris Green

Since the phone hanging on the end it still an analogue device requiring 50v DC to ring then the last section *is* still POTS. `

--
Chris Green

I don't think so.

Yep that's the bunny.

Sure I've had ISDN over copper before now. However if you can plug an ordinary analogue phone directly into it and hear a dial tone then it has POTS on it right ?

Nope mine is POTS, I plugged an old analogue phone into it when it was put in just to test it. How far that POTS goes is another matter about which I know nothing - after all I've a box where POTS signals go a few centimetres on a PCB before becoming SIP.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
The computer obeys and wins.                |    licences available see 
You lose and Bill collects.                 |    http://www.sohara.org/

Quite so, but Chris was absolutely correct.

"If there's a physical break in the wires then your POTS phone will stop working but because the internet connection uses (moderately) high frequencies the break in the wire just attenuates the signal somewhat but doesn't stop it working completely."

My new ADSL connection in my new flat only worked intermitently with my new top spec router. And older router loaned from a friend worked fine, so I exchanged the "defective" one. When that failed again I had the phone company tecnician in. Apperntly my phone socket only had one wire connected. (Had it not waorked at all, I'd have checked myself.) High freuwncies can be cpacitatively transmitted across gaps, badly and highly attenuated, but (nearly) enough.

The reason I could not just keep the old router was that there no longer is a phone connection in Germany. It's all voice over IP, i.e. a trumped up skype with all the drawbacks that entails. So I needed a router new enough to support that.

Phones used to work in emergencies. There was a direct wire to the exchange and that was battery buffered. Today an electrity blackout means no phone, no emrgency calls for an ambulance and no fire service in case one of the many candles used topples over. You're cutr off like rural places in the 19th century but unlike them totally inable to cope on your own.

--




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In the UK POTS phones, regardless of whether they have a dial or keys, is powered over the phone line: the clue is that there is only one cable connected to it and that plugs into the phone socket. This is a safety feature; the phone still works during a power cut provided that the phone line wasn't damaged too.

Some UK POTS phones were quite a lot fancier than that. For example, I'm still using an old Amstrad SP2050 POTS phone on my land line which must be around 35 years old. This has a keypad rather than a dialler, selectable tone or pulse dialling, hands-free operation (a speaker plus a mute button) and can store up to 10 phone numbers.

--
--   
Martin    | martin at 
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

Yes, but that power is now coming from a wall wart, backed up by a battery. Our local telco (Telus) has done a big push to fiber the last few years. We made the switch not too long ago (and saw our Internet rate jump yet again, this time up to 88Mbps). But I always wondered where I'd be if the power went out. Recently the power company was doing some major work and our power was out all day. I wish I had remembered to check the phone regularly to see how long the backup battery would last, but it was 4 hours into the outage before I remembered to dig out a line-powered phone and plug it in and try it. No dial tone.

--
/~\  Charlie Gibbs                  |  "Some of you may die, 
\ /        |  but it's a sacrifice 
 X   I'm really at ac.dekanfrus     |  I'm willing to make." 
/ \  if you read it the right way.  |    -- Lord Farquaad (Shrek)

I have fibre to the premises AND it sill has a POTS analogue phone service in the copper pair that runs with the fibre....

No premises in the UK that runs on *ADSL* does NOT have a POTS service on the same wires.

They are due to all be phased out, it is true, but not just yet. How can you tell? Line crackle. VOIP does not *crackle*

--
"What do you think about Gay Marriage?" 
"I don't." 
"Don't what?" 
"Think about Gay Marriage."

Exactly true. Had the same here. POTS uses baseband 100Hz-8KHz ADSL runs from about 50KHz to around 5MHz. If you get a line break you lose the lower bins up to about 1Mhz but above that stray coupling still allows some signal to get through depending on exactly how the break happens

--
"What do you think about Gay Marriage?" 
"I don't." 
"Don't what?" 
"Think about Gay Marriage."

Well not necessarily. VOIP can turn a digital channel into exactly what a POTS phone expects.

I have an analogue PABX with one incoming POTS line and the other plugged into the back of a router that has a VOIP circuit connected to a SIPGATE server.

They behave identically.

My fibre modem has a POTS port on it - instead of analogue POTS I COULD have VOIP coming down the fibre. And plug a standard phone into that

--
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign,  
that the dunces are all in confederacy against him." 

Jonathan Swift.

Indeed so!

Obviously in the 1960s all trunk analogue was replaced with 64kbps TDM digital channels, and one assumes that the exchanges actually had digital to analogue converters in them. That digital service - or a packet switched equivalent - has been getting nearer and nearer to thee consumer.

--
  ?A leader is best When people barely know he exists. Of a good leader,  
who talks little,When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,They will say,  
?We did this ourselves.? 

? Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Crikey. Germany was always way behind the UK. So are they simply not delivering an analogue service? Nor suppyling a POTS breakout box ?

--
"Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and  
higher education positively fortifies it." 

    - Stephen Vizinczey

That depends on which country you are.

In the UK, we are only just rolling out fibre to the premises. And the fibre has a copper pair alongside it to carry POTS, and currently although the fibre modem has a POTS port, unless you ask for that to be enabled, it isn't. And they discontinued battery backup as well.

Fibre to the cabinet, always has analogue pots on the line as well - the copper breaks at the cabinet and the analogue signal is connected back to the local exchange

Obviously ADSL always has analogue down the last mile anyway. Since you need copper back to the DSLAMS the phone service is effectively 'free'

- you need to pay line rental to get the ADSL, and if you select a decent PAYG package you wont pay extra to have a phone capable of receiving calls. Having a phone line implies having a number and connectivity to the phone network.

I documented my FTTP installation here

It is representative of what the latest UK connectivity looks like

--
"Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and  
higher education positively fortifies it." 

    - Stephen Vizinczey

Not here, the fibre termination is powered that way but the copper to the phone is just two wires from the pole.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays 
C:\>WIN                                     | A better way to focus the sun 
The computer obeys and wins.                |    licences available see 
You lose and Bill collects.                 |    http://www.sohara.org/

I believe quite a lot of 'base' phone provision in Germany until a few years ago was actually ISDN rather than analogue POTS.

--
Chris Green

Thats why my sister had a *modem* till 2009, was it?

--
Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have  
guns, why should we let them have ideas? 

Josef Stalin

I must agree with the frequency and broken wire as it makes sense if some connector or wireing is loose or damaged.

Regarding the VOIP and TDM - it is also true. TDM replaced the analog switches by keeping the analog signal to the customer. Then came NCS. What I meant was TDM was decommissioned and even NCS being decommissioned in favor of SIP.

Regarding power outages - don't know about Germany and UK, but Austria and Switzerland have huge fines if the operators fail to provide emergency call services. So there are backup batteries for the switches and the lines. It is trivial - the batteries take over until the diesel power generator turns on. The DMS100 had the batteries the size of a wall 50*4m. Compared to 4 Racks for a SIP switches with double capacity of subscribers.