The Power Cut Question
We get paid when somebody signs up for a hosted phone system through this site, so here is the argument that costs us money, made properly. A plain corded telephone on copper keeps ringing when the power is out. Nothing in a VoIP plan replaces that. For most businesses there is a good answer. For a few there is not.
Disclosure: AldoMedia is a paid affiliate of Unitel Voice. If you sign up through a link on this page we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. We only recommend what we would set up for our own clients, and we say plainly below who should not buy this.
The advantage that is not a feature
A copper pair carries a small current that comes from the phone company's building, not from yours. That building has batteries, generators and staff. Your outlet is not part of the arrangement, which is why a basic corded handset works in a room with no light in it.
A VoIP call has no version of that. The handset needs an outlet, the router needs an outlet, and the internet service needs the street around you powered. One storm takes all three at once. A battery under the desk keeps the router alive a while and does nothing about the wider outage.
The standard sales answer is that calls forward to a mobile. That answer is correct and we will get to it, but it is a different claim, and treating it as the same one is how people get surprised.
The copper phone is powered by somebody else's building. That is the whole trick, and no feature list can add it.
The test most landline offices already fail
Before you defend the advantage, find out whether you still have it. Two questions settle that.
First, is there a corded phone in the building. A cordless handset talks to a base station plugged into the wall, so when the power goes the base station goes and every handset is a paperweight. Plenty of firms kept a copper line specifically for outages, then replaced every phone on it with a cordless set, which quietly cancelled the thing they were paying for.
Second, is the dial tone still copper. If it arrives through a fibre box or the cable modem, you are relying on a battery in a box on the wall rather than on the phone company. The fuller version of that check is on the VoIP and landline comparison.
Then run it. On a quiet afternoon, unplug the router and every phone base station and try to dial out. Almost nobody has tested this, which is a strange thing to say about a safety measure.
The failover rule
For most businesses the answer fits in a sentence. Decide where calls go when the building is dark, and set it up the day the system is installed rather than the day you need it.
Because a hosted number is a record on a provider's platform rather than a wire to your door, the platform is still up when your building is not, and it can send the call elsewhere without being asked. In practice that means mobiles, and it should mean several in a ring group rather than one owner's phone.
Notice what that buys, because it is more than the corded phone gives you. The corded phone only helps if somebody is standing next to it in a dark building. Failover works when the office is closed, when staff went home early because the roads were bad, when the building has been evacuated, and when the outage started at three in the morning. In a real event an empty building is the ordinary case.
Two conditions attach. It has to be built while everything is working, because nobody sets up call routing well from a phone in a car park with calls already going missing. And somebody has to own it, since a failover list slowly fills with the numbers of people who left. Test it the way you test an alarm, on a date in the calendar.
Where failover does not answer it
Four situations where the honest answer is to keep a line.
- Safety and equipment lines. Alarm panels, fire lines and elevator phones are a separate decision, made in writing with your monitoring company and your inspector, never as part of a phone bill conversation. The landline comparison covers why some of them pass a casual test and still fail a real event.
- No usable mobile signal where your people are. Failover quietly assumes a bar of signal at the far end. Basements, metal buildings, thick masonry, a rural pocket where one carrier works and the others do not. If staff already step outside to take a call, failover is a plan that works outdoors.
- The outage is your busiest hour. Generator dealers, heating contractors, tree services, restoration firms, plumbers, snow work. The event that darkens the office is the event that makes the phone ring hardest, and it rings in volume. One mobile with call waiting is not a phone system. Those businesses keep an outage line, or size the failover properly with a real ring group.
- Somebody has to be reachable at a fixed place. A site office, a care setting, a gate, a front desk people inside the building will call in an emergency. That number belongs to the location.
For most of these the answer is not to abandon the switch. It is to keep one line. A single analog line held for outages costs a fraction of a full copper system, and everything else moves. We earn nothing on the line you keep, which is the point of saying it here.
The address is a record you maintain
There is a second thing you take on when you leave copper. Less dramatic than a storm, and easier to get wrong.
On a copper line the location tied to your number is a fact about the wire, and it keeps itself current. On a hosted system it is a record in an account. It is right on the day somebody types it and stays right only while somebody maintains it. It goes stale when you move premises, when a second office opens, when a desk phone is carried to another building, and when a handset goes home with an employee.
The failure is silent. Nothing warns you and calls work normally for years. Then somebody dials for help and help is sent to a suite you left in a previous lease. The person dialling is often the one least able to correct it, because it is a customer, a temp on their second shift, or somebody who has just been hurt.
Three rules cover it. Put the registered address on the moving checklist beside the mail and the sign. Register a location for every handset that leaves the building, or tell whoever carries it to use their mobile for emergencies. And read the record once a year against a date you already keep. Ten minutes, and nobody has ever been thanked for it.
The copper phone is a real advantage and a narrow one. For most small businesses a properly built failover is not merely acceptable, it is better, because it works when the building is empty and the corded phone does not. For a few it is no substitute at all. The test is short. Name the event, name where the call goes, name who answers. If any of the three needs a person standing in a dark building, keep a line and move everything else.
More from the blog
- The First Hour When Your Site Goes Down
- What Uptime Numbers Actually Allow
- Who Actually Owns Your Website
All posts are on the blog. The product side of this topic is on business VoIP, and the step by step material is in the guides.
Decide where the calls go
If your outage plan needs somebody standing in a dark building, keep the copper for now and we will tell you so. If it does not, set the failover up now, while everything is still working.