I worked for a company with about a dozen remote offices linked back to the HQ with T1s. To be on the safe side, I had POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines for backup in case the PBX or the T1 tielines went down. Normally they were used for fax machines and the like until they were needed for emergencies.

When the 2004 hurricanes blew through and knocked out the power to some of the offices, we found out that our POTS lines were dead.

POTS doesn’t need electricity. It runs off power in the central telephone offices, right?

It did in the old days. These days it may run on fiber to a SLCC (Subscriber Line Carrier Circuit) somewhere in your neighborhood where it is converted to copper and POTS. When the SLCC loses power and its backup batteries die, then your POTS line does too.

BellSouth (pre-merger) was pretty good about getting generators to the SLCCs, but they were less good about being able to get around to all of them to keep them fueled up. Generator dies, batteries exhaust, POTS goes down.

By the second storm, they got better at fueling them. Unfortunately, folks who needed fuel figured out they could punch holes in the generator gas tanks and steal the go juice. Obviously, without fuel, the generator would die and, see above. Now, instead of merely refueling the generator to bring the SLCC back to life, they had to replace the whole generator.

Before the start of the 2005 hurricane season, we asked BellSouth engineering to see that all our POTS lines were delivered on copper. Surprisingly enough, we (and they) discovered that there were a lot of areas where you couldn’t go copper all the way back to the central office; in newer neighborhoods, service is delivered on fiber and then converted for the “last mile.”