IP Telephony Drives in Power over Ethernet

GuitarNeophyte writes "The Channel Register states that although the idea for Power Over Ethernet has been around for a long time, the stage may finally be set for it to become an essential factor in our technical lives. One of the main reasons is because of the emergence of ip telephony. 'Telephones need to work in an emergency including when there is a power failure. Traditional telephones do, but IP phones will only do so if there is an uninterrupted power supply (UPS). The only practical way of guaranteeing power supply to a large number of IP phones is PoE.' Will IP telephones bring in PoE?"

Comments

Re:No 911? Quote the VOIP reseller...

[TimTheFoolMan]

Troll?

I guess I should have writte POE in big, bold letters to make sure everyone got the joke.

Tim

Useful

[Arghdee]

That'll be great when there's a storm, and trees bring down the power lines.

Deeper Implications

[Comatose51]

I remember a while back there was an article on Slashdot about how PoE can become an universal power standard. While there are different plugs and voltages used around the world, PoE has a standard jack. Sure PoE is low powered but with miniaturization, many of our devices can be powered off of PoE. With VoIP driving the spread of PoE, I hope this will build momentum in making the prediction come true. Imagine going to another country and needing to bring just a CAT 5 cable instead of a power adapter.

Re:Make little sense...

[BigDog1942]

Yeah, I've had a wireless phone for years, never a single problem during a blackout, it works fine. So tell me again why we need to reinvent the cell phone?

Re:Make little sense...

[sbraab]

and what do you think will power those access points? oh right POE

Traditional telephones do?

[slashdot.org]

Telephones need to work in an emergency including when there is a power failure. Traditional telephones do

The majority of phones today are cordless and practically none work without power.

I used to buy cordless phones that had a speaker on the base unit for this very reason, but alas, those also don't work anymore without power, on most modern phones.

Re:internet vs phone line

[kitzilla]

> My phone line has rarely gone down if ever. I can't come close to saying that about my internet connections, cable or DSL. The fact that we have two small children means when I pick up that phone in an emergency, I want it to work.

No freaking kidding. The phones were about the only thing that survived Hurricane Ivan last September (in my neighborhood, at least). When Hurricane Dennis went through last week, we were once again power/cable/waterless, but the phone still worked.

So I fired up my generator, jacked the laptop into Earthlink dial-up, and was right back online.

I'm in no hurry at all to abandon traditional telephony. It works.

Re:I think it will...

[afidel]

WTF are you talking about? PoE as ratified by the IETF does a low voltage chat over the unused pairs to determine if the device needs power, the likelyhood of a device not needing power and randomly responding over the unused pair correctly to trigger power is essentially nill. Certain pre-standard PoE injectors (such as those shipped with certain Cisco/Aironet AP's) may cause damage when used on a port with other equipment attached, but anything which is compliant with the 802.3af standard should have an essentially zero percent chance of frying attached equipment.