Weird keyboard behavior

Quite. I have some old phones with rotary dial that work fine with my router. But that router itself becomes useless in power outage.

Can I just say, completely irrelevantly, and somewhat reverentially, how very educational many OT threads can be?

As he who started a little side-track with his 'phone being dead, but the Internet still live - after those two weeks of frustrating arguments with PlusNet's Customer Services, a Techie cured my fault in a matter of minutes. I had always rather assumed that the fault was corrosion of the copper-plated steel wire because the Hook Switch did not cause the dialing tone to be produced. I had not given a thought to the various frequencies and capacitative jumping potentially being involved, but just assumed that the caused resistance interfered with the Exchange knowing that the handset had been lifted, but the very low powered Internet signal remained unaffected.

So thank you all :-)

Yes, and SIP over IP over whatever.

Apparently my fibre is TDM optical fibre with passive splitters so that hundreds of premises are fed bu a single fibre, and the fibre is split into multiple other ones passively, and every modem gets its own time slot, presumably encrypted so others cannot monitor it

Well that is true for UK POTS services. I once saw the exchange in Guernsey - where there was two weeks supply of diesel in tanks to feed the three gennies they had there. An island can be inaccessible for days at a time...and power was I think via a single cable from the mainland

But my point was that modern UK practice is to allow consumers with FTTP to have a POTS via SIP line service that *has no backup*. One assumes that the mobile service stays up during power cuts.

Sure the exchanges will stay up BUT the local modem that decodes the IP over Ethernet and sip from the fibre is not now issued with a battery backup

I am not sure how the service is in fact delivered over the fibre,. It may not be sip., It could be a low bandwidth multiplexed digital channel that simply goes through an A to D and has ring voltage and call detection added.

The good old days, when things woz done proper.

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

Never mind a *break*, while in the process of repairing a fault on my line, I was left ovenright with my actual exchange line coming to the top of the pole and connected to "pair A" in my overhead cable to the building, but my phone/router/house wiring going up the wall and connected to "pair B" in the overhead cable instead.

This was because the job of swapping pairs had been done at the house end (ladder access) but needed a lift platform to complete at the pole (elf and safety).

Overhead Me: BT:

Phone line -- dead. 0v. Obviously.

ADSL, disconnected on BOTH wires, working at very low speed.

The engineer didn't believe it possible that the modem was syncing *at all* "because you are not connected" ...

It battled on, despite this, from the leakage/capacitive coupling between pairs in 30 feet of overhead cable.

ADSL is effectively radio so if the pairs are close enough then it may indeed work (as you experienced)

I'm afraid that's probably useless. Anyway UPS' exist and it would be easy to proviode the same externally in your home. Your backup may provide a nice flawless dial tone, but in a power outage it's the external line I expect to be down. You no longer have the direct uninterrupted wire to the phone exchange with its emergency power but rather many active amplifier boxes in between.

I know very little about these things but the above is the gist of what I believe to have picked up. I may well be wrong.

Yes I pay a standard line rental and a small fee for unlimited national calls (listed as the "monthly package") and a separate fee for the FTTP broadband I actually ordered (listed as "additional charges") but there is no way to get the latter without the former despite them being on separate cables.

I was suggesting that since they insisted on running both (I only wanted the fibre) it would make sense to power the fibre terminator from the loop current and give the fibre the same kind of reliability that the copper has.

Makes you marvel at how it survives crosstalk from neighbouring lines ...

In fact it doesn't.

When I was on ADSL that after MW/LW radio was the largest source of interference. twisted pair is PRETTY good at rejecting external fields but its not PERFECT especially in a bloody great bunch

The saving grace is that the longer the cable is the weaker everybody's signal is at the receiving end and that's where the radio starts to dominate the noise equations, Especially after dark.

Far too sensible to ever be adopted...

Well dont know what YOU are describing but in the UK it is NOTHING like that.

ADSL goes directly back to a local battery backed exchange. VDSL goes to a street cabinet that I suspect is powered from the exchange, although that MAY be mains powered. The phone line continues to the powered exchange My fibre to the premises requires no power and goes they assured me 12 miles to the nearest TOWN without any electronics at all. So all I would need to keep alive is my house network and the optical modem.

But I still have powered copper and POTS although it costs me line rental. I make less than ten calls a month so its payg. Mostly I use email whatsapp skype or occasionally a mobile cellular call

So there are no 'active amplifier boxes' involved at all. Far too expensive!

The frame relay and or SONET backbone is also emergency powered orr there wouldn't be any point in keeping the phones up.

No chance. A POTS phone on hook (which most are, most of the time) consumes no power. A fibre terminator uses more power than even an off-hook POTS phone. The entire exchange's power supply and backup battery would need to be drastically redimensioned. And the company would charge you for the power you consumed, plus the huge capital cost.

David

That is why it never caught on in the UK

I migrated here from diam up modem and the best ratye - 48k or thereabouts, to ISDN . The router alone cost an arm and a leg an I was paying 4 times the price for an always on 64k connection..

Then I went I think to 256k fixed rate ADSL for several years that cost a lot less, before they accidentally told me that it didn't have to be fixed rate and it went up to around 5Mbps. ADSL was strictly big company stuff - multiple channels. We used to tell customers to order the multichannel stuff because then BT - the telco would install fibre at a cut price, then cancel the ISDN and install high bandwidth leased line internet instead!

Yeah - but I'm starting to contemplate a DC-DC converter and a couple of plugs ... but then I'd need to battery up the router, the switch and the APs.

That is a fair comment. I hadn't though of that. 20mA is all you can get off a POTS.

I have had SIP, cable only, for over a decade. It needs to be powered. It really isn't a problem. We have mobile phones, the argument about needing a powered phone for emergency services doesn't carry much weight any more.

Also, a break in the IP connection to the internet backbone, routing, is far more common than an electrical blackout. For me at least 10 times as common in the last decade.

I think those in New Jersey and Puerto Rico during the last hurricanes there (2017?) would disagree.

Landlines went out, due to fallen trees taking lines down and because POTS were no longer powered from the exchange, so stopped when mains power was lost. Mobiles failed too, shortly after the hurricane had passed by, because the backup batteries in cell towers were only good for a few hours operation. IOW, they were sized and costed to cover individual power outages but not for large scale disasters - and this in areas that were prone to hurricanes. I've seen comments, too, that the Puerto Rico telephone system has still not been fully restored to pre- hurricane service levels, so well done Trump's FCC and the wonderful Ajit Pai. At least here in the UK most phone lines are underground.