Unified Communications

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  • 1.  LTE POTS lines for 911

    Posted 03-15-2023 01:42 PM

    As I'm sure you know the phone companies have been discontinuing or raising the prices on POTS lines for a while now.  We've been trying out a couple of LTE POTS replacements, specifically for LSP/BSM purposes, but the 2-3 that we've tried don't seem to be reliable.  The boxes have to be restarted constantly.  We've used coax lines in locations where they're available with success, but they're not available everywhere.  Has anyone else ran into this and come up with a good solution?  



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    Travis Hill
    Sr Voice and Video Engineer
    Scansource
    Greenville
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  • 2.  RE: LTE POTS lines for 911

    Posted 03-15-2023 01:57 PM

    I guess the better question is -- unless you are a super small company that only had 2-3 lines.... why go the route of POTS lines anymore?

    On most SIP circuits, you can put in foreign numbers (numbers outside your area code), so it makes sense to consolidate all of your remote phone number to your 'main office'.  Saves on trunking and often times gives you a lot more reliability and features.

    If it was for emergency (911) purposes, most SIP trunks now route using DID numbers rather than physical termination points of a circuit.  Port the numbers to your main SIP circuit, and use them for outbound emergency calls.

    If it is for reliability -- you are probably better off getting a good backup circuit to those remote sites and having it VPN back to your main campus...   Units like Cradlepoint or Pepwave are great for getting a 5G SIM card and using that as a backhaul if your main circuit is offline.  Heck, you could even deliver a small amount of SIP trunks over those lines if you needed to...

    There are new ways to deliver those types of services -- and going the POTs equivalent way is a loosing battle. 



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    Nick Kwiatkowski
    Director of Design and Engineering
    Michigan State University
    East Lansing MI
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