The Time for POTS Replacement Has Come

By: John Shepler

Nobody likes change when it is forced upon them. But change we must as technology relentlessly advances. On its way out are innovations from the gilded age. The incandescent light bulb? Gone. The telegraph? Long gone. The telephone line? You guessed it. It’s going fast.

POTS is Kaput!
Alexander Graham Bell’s fantastic invention, the telephone, is going stronger than ever. But, it has morphed into technologies that weren’t dreamt of by Bell or Watson. What’s on the way out is the century-old connection system of twisted pair copper wires and the instruments that connect to them.

Plain Old Telephone Service or POTS is the current jargon for standard telephone lines consisting of two small diameter copper wires connected to a telephone company office that provides the power, switching and signaling needed to allow any phone to talk to any other phone around the world.

Why Ditch It?
There are two answers. Cell phones and Computer Networks. Neither have any use for POTS interfaces. Residential users have long embraced their smartphones to the exclusion of most everything else. Fewer and fewer are willing to pay the phone company ever increasing fees just to have an old-timey desk or wall phone available just in case the cell tower goes out.

Businesses have been on a similar trajectory. Mobile phones have become important business tools, but the desk phone still has a lot of value. The only difference is that the desk phone often connects to the computer LAN rather than its own unique network. This enables a lot more calling features, including a mash-up of desk sets, smartphones, laptops, PCs and tablets.

With this every increasing switch away from POTS, the phone companies find themselves with huge stockpiles of lines and switching equipment but less and less revenue to support them. That’s why the petitioned the FCC to let them decommission their copper resources and convert the central offices to data centers in high demand by AI and other computing needs.

Why Copper Retirement is Actually a Problem
Not everybody is on-board with chucking a perfectly good technology that is serving them reliably. Lots of businesses still have multiple POTS lines with in-house switching. Larger systems use a digital connection called PRI that multiplexes 23 POTS lines into a par of… you guessed it…twisted pair copper wires. Yes, as POTS goes away so does PRI and its cousin, T1 lines, that use the same wiring.

Another problem is FAX. Traditional FAX machines were designed for POTS and don’t like packet switched networks such as the Internet. Other systems specific to elevator phones, fire and burglar alarms, credit card verification, gate access, and emergency call boxes also were designed for POTS and only POTS. You don’t just plug these into your LAN and call it a day. So, what to do?

POTS Replacement Options
While POTS, PRI, T1, DSL and other copper line connections are rapidly fading into the sunset and not likely to return, there are replacement solutions available. Some popular ones are based on LTE cellular with dual SIM cards, battery backup, and failover Internet access. Also important is that a POTS replacement box provides the same signaling and RJ-11 connector that you’d get from a telephone line wall jack.

On a larger scale, SIP trunking is a replacement for carrying multiple phone lines used in offices and call centers. It can be provisioned over the Internet or, better yet, through a direct connection to a cloud phone service provider that interconnects with the Public Switched Telephone Network.

Have you been notified that your POTS service is being discontinued or greatly increasing in cost? It’s time to consider moving on with a new network based system or a POTS replacement appliance that simply drops in place of your old phone line. Get expert technical advice and pricing on POTS replacement solutions now.

The 3 Types of VoIP Lines for Business

By: John Shepler

Businesses large and small have been migrating to VoIP telephone technology for years now. Some are delighted with the move and have never look back. Others feel like they’ve lost something in the way of performance. The calls are often muddled and it’s hard to carry on a two way conversation. Would you believe that its the exact same technology involved? Why is it that VoIP telephony can range from excellent to unacceptable? Let’s take a look.

What’s VoIP
VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is a means to convert telephones into computer peripherals. The reason to do that is both to save money and enable applications that just won’t work on the old style telephone network. Network voice is a powerful tool, but can more easily be degraded that simpler analog phones.

Old School Phone Systems
Business phone lines are sometimes called POTS for Plain Old Telephone Service. They consist of twisted copper pair wires that run directly from the phone set all the way to the telephone company. Each phone has its own set of wires. Once you get more than a few phones, however, you face a mounting phone bill since the telco charges you to make internal as well as external calls.

Companies get around this by installing their own phone switches. Small systems use Key Telephone Systems where multiple outside lines are available on each phone but you can also call within the building on your own wiring. Larger companies install PBX (Private Branch Exchange) switches that manage a pool of outside lines that can be assigned to any phone as needed.

If you only have a couple of phones, each with their own line, the phone company takes care of all the switching for you. With many phones, you become your own little phone company for inside calls. That means you have to take care of all the special phone wiring and the Key or PBX switching equipment. Plus, you have to pay for multiple outside analog lines or a digital PRI trunk to get to the public telephone system.

How VoIP is Different
With VoIP, each phone plugs into your company LAN. That gets rid of the second special phone network. You still need something to switch the calls between phones. This can be a VoIP PBX or IP PBX that you have in-house. It can also be a much larger hosted PBX system from a hosted VoIP service provider. Hosted means that a specialized company “hosts” or run the system. You are one of many clients that they host. It’s pretty much like buying web hosting. You simply pay by the month for service instead of having to install and maintain your own equipment.

VoIP Phone Line Needs
All VoIP phones connect to a local network. This can be a small home office network that has only a computer, WiFi router, VoIP phone adaptor (for a regular phone) and broadband modem. Or, it can be an extensive corporate LAN that is bridged into multiple business locations nationwide and even overseas. The principles and the requirements for high quality performance are the same.

Since the network is shared with many phones and other computing devices, it take some doing to make sure that you get high performance. With dedicated analog lines, that’s the phone company’s problem. With VoIP, it’s now your IT problem.

What’s needed is plenty of bandwidth to accommodate all the phones and other devices. But that’s not enough. You need to give the voice packets priority over data because phone calls will start sounding muddled and choppy long before you notice that the file is loading slower. The network also needs low latency, packet loss and jitter to be transparent to the packets carrying the VoIP digitized phone conversations.

3 Types of VoIP Phone Lines
All analog phone lines are alike. All ISDN PRI trunks are alike. VoIP phone lines can be quite different. They range from Internet VoIP to SIP Trunks to MPLS private networks.

Using the Internet as Your Phone LIne
The low end of the market, which keeps costs low for home offices and small businesses, uses a broadband Internet service to connect to the VoIP service provider. You can share your broadband connection with a couple of computers, a WiFi router, and a few VoIP phones. You’ll need a router that creates CoS (Class of Service) to prioritize the phones or the computers will interfere with your calls. Sometimes the service provider will give you an adaptor that does this.

The advantage of using the Internet as a phone line is that it’s cheap. You probably already have broadband for your computer. The lure is to save money by “eliminating the separate phone line.” The downside is that the Internet was never designed for telephony. It was intended to reliably transport data files. There is no prioritization of voice on the Internet and most access lines, like DSL, Cable, Satellite and Cellular, are shared broadband. It’s a cost vs performance tradeoff. You may find that some calls sound perfect but others break up or sound muddled. It all depends on what else is happening on the Internet while you are making your call.

One way to improve Internet VoIP is to use a dedicated Internet access (DIA) like T1 or Ethernet over Copper. This keeps your neighbors from disrupting your calls while they download large video and software programs, but you are still subject to network congestion on the Internet itself.

Private Line VoIP Service
Companies that depend on high quality phone service for customer support and employee productivity usually sidestep the Internet in favor of something more predictable. The outside line that compares most closely to the legacy analog and PRI lines is the SIP Trunk. This is a digital broadband line, but it is a private line that is not shared with others. It’s called a SIP trunk because it supports SIP or Session Initiation Protocol, the switching system for VoIP calls.

A simple SIP trunk is a T1 line that runs from your network to your service provider. It supports up to a couple dozen simultaneous phone conversations or a combination of phone calls and Internet. The Internet service has a lower priority than the phone calls and uses whatever bandwidth isn’t needed for the phones at any given time. Smaller companies that don’t have dozens of phones find this is a great cost saver compared to maintaining separate phone and broadband lines.

Larger SIP trunks are also available for bigger companies or call centers. Both copper and fiber optic bandwidth is available to support as many calls as you need.

Voice over MPLS Networks
Major corporations generally have many business sites located around the country and even in other countries. They still want any employee to easily call any other employee without paying long distance toll charges. They also need to make outside calls to anyone with a phone.

A sophisticated solution is called VoMPLS or Voice over MPLS networks. MPLS is a private network arrangement with a regional, national or international service footprint. The network operator ensures that each paying customer has the necessary Class of Service, bandwidth and low latency, packet loss and jitter that they need for high performance.

VoMPLS works a lot like VoIP using SIP Trunks. The difference is that instead of having to run dedicated private lines among all your locations, you simply need an access line from each location to the MPLS network. This can give you a major cost savings, especially on those long international connections, while maintaining high network performance.

Are you in search of a better telephone solution, to reduce costs, increase available features or both? If so, there are VoIP telephone solutions you should take a close look at.

QT Talk is Both VoIP and Dial-Around

You’ve been toying with the idea of switching your phone service to VoIP to save money and get more calling features. But now you’re in a quandary. VoIP is a landline service that needs a wire. Granted, it’s a broadband wire like DSL or Cable Internet. But you still need a fixed location to install it. What do you do when you are out and about, like you are most of the time? For that you need wireless service. Wireless and VoIP? They don’t go together, do they?

Now they do. You’re not the only one with this problem. Lots of people would like the calling features and low rates, especially international rates, that are offered by popular VoIP calling plans. But they also want these rates available on their cell phone. QT Talk says, “no problem.” Take both at the same price.

How can this possibly work? It’s a very clever system. The heart of the service is a feature-rich VoIP telephony service. The most popular option is called North America Plus, which includes unlimited calling to the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico for a special introductory rate of $12.95 for the first 3 months. Then it’s the standard rate of $19.95 per month, a great deal in itself. You also get to choose a special low rate to an international destination that includes Mexico, Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Vietnam.

Well that sounds great for a VoIP service, but what about cellular use? How are you going to call Mexico or Vietnam from your cell phone and not get a monster bill the next month?

Ah, that’s where the dial-around service comes into play. Along with your North America Plus VoIP service, you also get free access to a toll-free number that gives you the same rate that you enjoy on your VoIP. So, if you want to make a nice long call to Canada from your cell, just call the toll free number and talk to your heart’s content. It’s all part of your plan. Want to call Vietnam from your car (while stopped, of course)? It’s just 9.9 cents a minute on your cell, along with using cellular minutes.

Who is QT Talk service ideal for? It’s for residential and small business users, like home offices, that want an unlimited calling plan within the US, Canada and Puerto Rico. It is especially good if you make international calls to any of the 6 designated countries. You can upgrade your service to have unlimited calling to 35 global destinations with a service called Unlimited World Select. That’s just $34.95 a month.

How about those VoIP features? Included with your service are speed dialing, call forwarding, simultaneous ring, call waiting, caller ID, call return, caller ID block, do not disturb, last number redial, conference calls, transfer your current number or get a new one, and online account management. All this, no extra charge.

So who’s behind QT Talk? It’s QT Globe, a major international telecommunications company that sells wholesale services to other carriers. They’ve got the network in place to serve fussy telecom carriers, but they also offer retail services to serve fussy individuals and businesses.

By the way, QT Talk also offers feature rich business plans and IP telephones as well as the residential services designed for the individual, family and home office user.

Does this sound like a service that would meet your needs? If so, learn more and order your QT Talk calling plan quickly and easily online.

Phone Toll-Free Service

In a business environment where it's hard to get anyone to buy anything, the easier you make it for your customers to do business with you, the more likely they'll buy from you instead of your competitor. One benefit that prospects and existing customers consider valuable is the ability to call toll-free instead of paying for the phone call themselves.

It may seem silly that people will make a buying decision on whether they have to spend a matter of pennies or dimes to make a phone call. But consumers are fickle. That even applies to business people under pressure to cut expenses no matter what. Letting them phone toll-free may not be the major part of the decision, but it does remove one more objection. Why not do it when the cost to you is so very little? Plus, when you get the right toll-free service you get additional valuable business tools that make your job easier and more productive.

One excellent provider of toll-free phone services is Kall8. You can get a toll-free number instantly for just $2. Then for merely $2 a month you have the online management system to put your toll-free number to work. Until someone calls, that's all you pay. You are charged just 6.9 cents per minute for incoming calls from the contiguous 48 states, slightly more for calls that originate in Alaska and Hawaii. Can it get much better?

You bet it can. The low cost and instant availability of toll free numbers is just the start of the service from Kall8. The first additional service you'll enjoy is the ability to change your ring-to number at will. That's the number of the phone that will ring when someone calls your toll free number. It doesn't always have to be the same phone.

Some sales people find it valuable to set their ring-to number to their office phone when they are at their desk, and then change it to their cell phone when they leave. At home they can leave it programmed to ring their cell, or they can change it to ring their home phone. That saves cell minutes and ensures that a prospect or client can always reach you immediately. Don't you think you might close more sales if the caller doesn't get frustrated by voice mail and goes elsewhere?

Do you ever get need to receive FAX messages? You may be calling from the road, but the FAX you need will be sent to a distant office machine. Not with Kall8. You just have your caller send the FAX to your toll-free phone number. It will be received by Kall8 and sent to your email. You can get access to it at hotel or coffee shop hotspot or even on your Internet-enabled smartphone.

Voice mail has a similar feature. If you elect to have your messages go to voice mail, you can call into the system to hear them. Or just have Kall8 send them to your computer as a sound file attached to an email.

Need to make a long distance call from someone's home or a client's office? You surely don't want them to have to pay for it. No need to. Call your Kall8 number, enter the access code, and you'll be able to use the service in reverse as a virtual calling card. The cost of the call will be charged to your account at the same 6.9 cents per minute that you pay for incoming calls.

You can even set up conference calls, with up to 25 participants calling in on your toll-free number. Kall8 takes care of the conferencing bridge and charges you the regular per minute cost per participant. This feature is included with your toll-free service and is available anytime you need it.

There are other features, including detailed call reports, that you'll find handy in managing your toll-free phone number. Hard to believe you can get all this for just $2 a month plus the cost of the calls. If you are paying more than that now or have always wanted toll-free service but thought it was too expensive, then learn more and order your Kall8 toll-free phone number(s) now.

VoIP Comparison Shopping

There's no doubt that VoIP or Voice over IP telephony is the hot new thing in residential and business phone service. Like all new technologies, advancements are rapid and new companies with better offers spring up right and left. So if you are dissatisfied with your current service or want to find the best deal you can get for switching to VoIP, how do you choose? Do you just go for what's advertised on TV, see what you can find searching online, or what? How about a comparison shopping service that makes it easy to see what's available and pick the best service for your needs? Does that sound like a good idea?

You bet it is. Fortunately just such a comparison shopping tool has become available and is free to use online. You can try it right now at Affordable VoIP. Go ahead, it will open in a new window and you can still read the rest of this guide.

The Affordable VoIP guide is aimed at residential and small to medium size businesses who need anywhere from a single line phone service to a virtual office with numerous extensions, but don't want the expense and hassle of running their own telephone system. If you have a corporate office or call center with your own PBX and a support team, you'll be interested in ISDN PRI and SIP Trunks at reduced prices. If you don't know what that means, Affordable VoIP is right for you.

Let's take a look at how the search function works. At the VoIP comparison shopping page, go ahead and select the Plan Type as "Business". If you call internationally, select the most frequent country you call. Otherwise don't touch that selection. Let's pick United Kingdom, just to see what we get. Now check any optional additional information you want considered, such as No Activation Fee, Adapter/Router included, and Digital Phone included. I'll select Adapter/Router included because I want to use my existing phone.

Click the Search button and you'll get results within a couple of seconds. I count 17 plans from 4 different vendors that meet these requirements. The cheapest is a FAX only extension for $9.99 a month. Most plans are in the $25 to $50 a month range, but with differing features. How do you choose? First thing to do is let your mouse hover over linked name of the service provider. You'll see a short description of what that particular plan includes. Click on the link or magnifying glass next to it and You'll be taken to a vendor specific page that offers complete details.

Note also that you can sort by column on this results page. I was interested in the rate to the United Kingdom, so I'll click on that column heading to sort by price from low to high. The lowest cost plan that offers calling to the U.K is Phone Power Freedom Business Unlimited package that charges just 1 cent per minute. The others offer a rate of 3 cents per minute. Wow, compared to conventional telephony these international rates sure are low!

You can also sort on the other column headings, which are Service Provider, Plan Name, Monthly Cost, Activation Fee, and Regular Minutes. If you find a plan you want, just click on the Order Now link and you'll be taken to the vendor's order page. At the bottom of the chart there is also a link to change your search criteria if you want to try other options. You can sit and play with this all night, if you want. That's a lot easier that trying to contact each company and make notes on their plans to compare prices and options.

You can choose to select residential instead of business plans. The system works the same, but there tend to me more vendors serving the residential marketplace and the monthly costs tend to be lower. You do retain the option to include a favorite overseas destination in your search. Once again, the rates you'll find seem to be eye-poppingly low with VoIP services.

That's all there is to it. This tool is available 24/7 and gives you near-instant results on a comparison chart of services, costs and features. Give the Affordable VoIP comparison shopping tool a try and see how much it can help you find the best deal on broadband phone service for your home or office.

Lonliness of the Long Distance Landline

The latest telephone usage statistics confirm what we've already suspected. People are running away from landlines like they're allergic to copper. If Alexander Graham Bell came back to life in his lab today and spilled battery acid in his lap, he'd be screaming for Watson in his prototype transmitter to no avail. Nobody would be listening at the other end of that wire. Now if he had the presence of mind to whip out his cell phone and select the picture of Mr. Watson as one of his favorites, that call would likely go through. Watson, like just about everybody else, has gone wireless.

It's no surprise that most everyone carries a cell phone. They probably have two or three more old ones, sitting in a drawer, that should be recycled. People just love staying connected. They're on those phones even when they shouldn't be. Sit at any stop light and watch the cars turning left in front of you. About every third one has a driver on the phone. Sadly, one too many of those has a cigarette in the other hand is driving with their elbows. Ma Bell would never have sat still for that.

Ma didn't have to. In the days when houses were built with special nooks for the telephone set, you needed wires to make anything happen. Those wires might happen to include a run of barbed wire cattle fence. No matter. It was the requirement for electrical conductors that led to the universal copper pair that runs to every home and business. But the way things are going, you might as well dig up that copper and use it to make pennies. People are abandoning their landlines. Today 30% wouldn't pick up a home phone even if it rang.

My how things have changed. Growing up in our house I remember everyone but my grandmother being thrilled when we finally got off the neighborhood party line and got our own private phone line. I used to watch her comically sitting at the desk with her hand cupped over the transmitter of our one heavy flat-black non-dial telephone set. Neighborhood conversations were at least as amusing as the early TV shows. By the time I became a homeowner, there were outlets for telephones in just about every room including the basement. Your phone was your connection to everyone near and far. You wanted your number printed in the telephone directory so that people could find you.

At my house, we're the kind of people who just wouldn't feel right if there wasn't a telephone hanging on the wall or sitting on the desk. Who isn't? Younger people. Those who have no memory of "number, please" operators or a day when the term "cell phone" sounded like something you'd find in a prison. That's everybody under 30. A third of those have only a cell phone. If mom wants to call, she better have the number written down. It's not published.

There's another group that's somewhere in the middle. They either have regular landline telephone service but don't use it, or they've moved on to the latest technology. Cable companies want to be in the phone business. They offer bundles of TV, phone service and broadband Internet called "triple play". The telephone service actually uses the broadband rather than standard phone wires. This is VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol. It's big advantage is that you can get more features for less money, especially in a bundled service. It does have the annoying problem of going dead when the power goes out or when the Cable broadband dumps. Then you use your cell phone.

But if you are going to use your cell phone some of the time at home and all of the time while mobile, why bother with a landline or VoIP phone service at all? That's what the younger generations think. Many kids today get their first cell phone when they are in high school, take it to college, and by the time they're out in the world everybody they want to talk to knows their cell number. Why not just keep the cell on at home instead of having a completely different number or a "find me follow me" setup? You don't need finding or following if you only have one number.

Along with landlines, the concept of competitive long distance phone service is fading from the scene. This was one of the first products of phone system deregulation. You could save a lot of money by switching to an alternative provider, and probably still can if you are a heavy landline user. This service was so aggressively marketed that it became a TV punchline for someone to pick up a ringing phone during dinner and say: "No, I don't want to switch my long distance phone service."

Now, what's long distance? Most cellular service plans work the same whether you are calling across town or across the country. You buy bundles of anytime minutes and just make sure you don't go over your monthly limit. If that's a chronic problem, you can now get plans with unlimited anytime minutes.

Long distance still comes into play for international calling. If you have relatives or business associates overseas, you're sensitive to international rates. International minutes are almost always an additional charge. You can keep your costs down by using low rate International calling cards and whatever phone you wish. This is also probably the best justification for VoIP going forward. Simply coordinate with your contacts overseas to use the same VoIP service, and your "on network" calls are free. The Internet becomes the phone line.

Verizon has a interesting approach whereby fiber optic cable replaces your TV coaxial cable, your telephone line, and your DSL or Cable broadband connection. Signals beamed through glass fibers are far faster and more flexible than other technologies. So much so that TV, broadband Internet and telephone service all have their own wavelengths and don't interfere with each other. In this case, the telephone company is taking over the television business and perhaps preserving the legacy of home phone service for future generations.