By Steve Leaden
Is This For Real?
Such a boring but essential topic: Plain Old Telephone Service, or POTS for short. Very recently we have begun to see a trend in POTS line costs that are unprecedented. In some areas of California, costs for POTS have risen by 5x in the last 24+ months; in the Midwest, at least double; in the Northeast at least 50%. Something has to be done – the sheer price point alone will force an enterprise to reconsider POTS.
Why the necessity for POTS (traditionally)? POTS is very useful for any of the following applications:
- Fax machines
- Elevators (emergency phones)
- Alarms
- Remote access to your legacy PBX
- Failover for survivable remote sites leveraging UC
- Credit card machines
- Modems for remote access
- Lead number, circuits/lines used at SMB sites and smaller enterprise branch sites
- 911 access from a location
- Overflow/failover at most remote voice IP-enabled UC sites (corporate or branch sites)
And here is another interesting component: these types of services used for data DO NOT work well, in some cases if at all, over SIP trunks or other IP connections. In the legacy world of digital Communications, it was not difficult to use an analog extension at 56K and fax machines at 33K. When VoIP arrived, the cap for analog extensions went down to 19K. That started around 10+ years ago.
In many cases fax machines and modems find it difficult to communicate over SIP, and, in fact the T.38 fax protocol for SIP either works or doesn’t. An alternative is running fax machines at G.711 and sometimes that works, or deliver faxing over PRIs (another legacy carrier service beginning to go south). The same goes for modems and even more limiting.
With the skyrocketing interest for SIP trunking at the enterprise level (and now video over SIP) and the entire market of real time communications moving quickly to IP, it is only a matter of time when POTS will be “no more” for enterprise customers, a.k.a. “POTS ARE DEAD.”