Preppers: Maybe we Need to go Back to POTS
Kevin Felts 08.10.18
ATT had an outage on August 9, 2018. I do not know how wide spread the outage was, but it covered cell phones and home Internet access in my area. Besides television, people were cut off from the outside world. As far as we knew, World War III could have started.
Maybe it is time to go back to a plain old telephone service, aka POTS as a backup. Why POTS? Because it works.
Modern technology has some wonderful benefits. We can do everything from watch cat videos on YouTube, get instant election results, or even watch President Trump talk to world leaders as it happens. The technology also comes with a cost, and that is reliability.
Some cell phone providers say they have 99% up time. That does not take natural disasters into account. When the grid goes down, so do the cell phones, and in some cases, the Internet, like what happened on August 9, 2018.
After Hurricane Ike and Rita hit southeast Texas just about all forms of communications went down. One thing that worked in some areas was good ole DSL. Why did DSL work? Because it uses the same system as the plain old telephone. Cell phones were down, cable modems were down, but in some cases DSL still worked.
With companies such as Vonage offering low cost phone service over Internet, people have been dumping plain old telephones for decades. It has gotten to the point where almost nobody I know has a home phone. If they do have a home phone, chances are it is something like Vonage, or some kind of other Internet based service.
It seems just about everything we use is based on cell phone service, Internet access, or both. When those services go down, what do we have as a backup? What do we have that is reliable and can be used when just about everything else has failed?
Chances are most of us have a cell phone, Facebook, some type of chat app, and that is about it. What do those have in common? Cell phone service and or Internet.
How many of the readers even have an old style wired telephone in a closet somewhere? I know I do not, and maybe that needs to change?
