From Our Founder

“Mr. Watson, I can’t hear you now.”  I morphed Alexander Graham Bell’s famous words with those of a popular cellular telephone company commercial to help illustrate a problem I discovered last week when the inclement weather visited our area.

When the storms came through they interrupted power service in many parts of the region… lighting and tree limbs are funny that way.  Work continues for maniacs like me irrespective of Mother Nature’s untimely surprises.  That work includes contacting people via their office telephone.  As I attempted to call people I was greeted with ceaseless ringing with no answer and no voice mail.  I wondered, “what’s up with that… 10 a.m. and everyone has abandoned their offices and left their SOHOs.”  Then it dawned on me.  No power, no phone system.  No phone system, no voice mail.  Left powerless, the fancy IP-telephone systems and key system units (KSUs) at the heart of modern phone systems are useless.  The phone lines are alive, but without a beating heart the phones don’t work.

What amazed me was how pervasive this condition was.  When the power went out, the phones did too.  Someone forgot to connect their phone system and associated electronics to an uninterruptible power source (UPS).

In the old days we did not have to worry about this because the phone company supplied the power which made our systems work.  But as we decentralized telephone service to save money and enjoy more features, we failed to appreciate the importance of power.

So the lesson to be learned is straight-forward and simple.  You need a UPS on your phone system and you need to periodically check it to make certain it’s functioning properly (i.e. the batteries are charged and the device works when the power goes out).  This also holds true for our SOHOs using IP-based telephone services such as Vonage.  Whether you’re using cable or DSL, if your “magic boxes” are not connected to a UPS when the power goes out, so does your phone service … you can’t call out and no one can call in.

Just as we protect our personal computers and servers with UPSs, we must also protect our phone systems and communications hardware (“magic boxes”).

I invite you to benefit from 20+ years of telecommunications experience … the cost of business interruption is far greater than the investment in a UPS.  There is no need for your phones to be down when the power is out.