Schubin Cafe: Old School Tech Proves Reliable in Aftermath of Sandy

New Yorker and SMPTE Fellow Mark Schubin celebrates the role some old school technologies played during the power outage in New York City last week. One was the wired telephone network, sometimes referred to as POTS (plain old telephone service). A POT (plain old telephone) connected to the network receives BORSCHT.

“While I’m sure that many would have been happy to get a nourishing soup in the storm’s aftermath, BORSCHT, in this case, is an acronym for the functions provided by a POTS central office to a phone line: battery power, overvoltage protection, ringing current, supervision of the subscriber terminal (e.g., knowing when the phone is picked up), codec (coding and decoding associated with transmission), hybrid (conversion between two-wire and four-wire communication), and testing,” writes Mark. “That first, battery power, was how we were able to receive calls from some who had no other form of two-way communication.”

To read the full column, click here.

 

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