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

This does not necessarily follow.

[MindNumbingOblivion]

If we lived in a world without cell phones, I would say that yes, this would be a likely outcome. However, I live in a college town, where I'd say 9/10 people have a cell phone as their primary means of telecommunication. The attitude toward a land line is that it's for old people and businesses.

I'd say that we will eventually have PoE, but I don't think it will be a necessary consequence of VoIP or telephony. I have VoIP, but I use it exclusively for the three hours a day I work as a call desk support monkey for my company. If I had an emergency, I have my cell phone on me as well.

This is something I've wondered about a lot: how many slashdotters out there use VoIP as their primary telecommunications resource? How many would use telephony once x gets improved?

Better Solution

[dracocat]

We were facing the same problem and found it cheaper to inject POE right at the phone untill we found that you could buy a 24 port power injector for a couple hundred dollars off of ebay. Put these things next to your switch and inject it there.

Something is wrong with the math currently because a 24 port switch with POE is almost three times as expensive than a 24 port switch & a 24 port POE injector.

Re:Make little sense...

[skids]

Yeah, there are solar cell price drops on the horizon. Well I guess it depends on what you define as the horizon. There's now a room-temperature nano-self-assembly spray that turns itself into solar cells in the lab. Made, I might add, by the co-author (Warner) of "green chemistry" who is into all sorts of really cool stuff and worth keeping track of. Saw him speak a while back and he was very entertaining.

PoE rocks though. As an EE, I read the spec expecting to be horrified at all the shortcuts, brainfarts, and other cruft you find in other standards associated with ethernet or "lets-jam-everything-over-frame-based-networks-whe re-it-dont-belong." But the standard was surprisingly thorough, and I very much look forward to a wider range of PoE products becoming available 1) because they will make it easy to power from renewable sources (48-56V DC, no 120V 60HZ invertor needed) and 2) because I really hate USB and it would be nice if PoE took a shot at it's market niche.