Question about Charter Telephone?

Question

They're coming to install soon. They offered us the battery back up for $40. I understand that if the electricity goes out the batter will cover from 5-8 hours of phone usage. We definately need it, cause the electric goes out alot.

But my question is this...what if the cable goes out? Sometimes it goes out all by itself. Other times, when the electric goes out, the cable goes with it. Will this battery backup work even if the cable goes out?

THANKS

Answer 1

The battery backup is to cover your IP router and phone adaptor. If you lose power at home, as long as there's still a cable signal, your battery backup powers both your router and adaptor so that you still have phone service. If you use a corded phone, you're getting power off the phone line. Cordless phones need a powered base, so unless you put that on a uninterrupted power supply (UPS), you can't use a cordless phone in a power loss situation.

Once you lose a cable signal, that's pretty much it, whether you have backup power or not on your TVs and cable receivers.

Answer 2

Cable/Internet/VoIP are three seperate services running off the same pipe, one can function without the other, but if the whole cable connection goes out,then yes, you'd be pretty much hosed.

The battery backup also sounds like a moot point as well, without electricty to power any devices, especially ones like cordless phones, it just seems useless to me, because in the end, you'll probably have to rely on something like a cellphone when it comes to outages.

But for what its worth, I use the whole charter bundle, and thats really never even been an issue because that kind of total failure is pretty rare under normal conditions.