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

No 911? Quote the VOIP reseller...

[TimTheFoolMan]

...nevermore... nevermore....

Tim

Ethernet over Power?

[GreatRedShark]

Apparently, my cousin has Ethernet over Power, that was installed by The Internet Service Guy...

It would be interesting to see what happens if you ran Ethernet over Power on a system powered by Power over Ethernet... who would win? an epic battle, to be sure! ...or maybe they would cancel each other out, and you'd just get regular ethernet? ...or maybe it would be like a divide-by-zero, and your NIC would explode? :P

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?

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.