re: Anybody have a VOIP system for their office?

It will be difficult to get an actual POTS land-line nowadays, most phone companies don't even offer them any more.

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It will be difficult to get an actual POTS land-line nowadays, most phone companies don't even offer them any more.

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Also, POTS lines can be expensive. About 10 years ago rates for a business POTS line was about 65 dollars plus long distance calls and a smaller geographical calling area. Heck depending on the long distance rate plan and other factors regional calling could be more expensive than an out of state call.


Now with cellular and some VOIP plans most long distance calls are free. But if redundancy is your plan POTS can still go down because most are still dependent on Fiber to copper exchanges in the field. Ma’bell doesn’t have generators at those sites so you have to wait until they run a generator over to there when the batteries run out. Also with POTS you could run a trunk system where you may only have a few lines out and in, but those can run out fast depending on the number of callers.


I am old enough to remember when some CLEC’s would offer multiple T-1’s and Phone lines that would take some of the data off the throughput of the bonded T-1’s. The whole plan sounded sketchy but it worked for some businesses that didn’t need super fast internet. It actually saved some money running it that way.

Since T-1 LInes used the POTS network it was pretty reliable as long as you had power on the end user site and AT&T had its network going.

Fiber pretty much replaces all of that infrastructure and puts faster connections and phone service all through one interface box called an ONT. Also most networks are passive so the fiber travels through splices where there is no power. Meaning as long as there is power on both ends (Central Office and business) and there are no cuts in the fiber your connection should work.