Escapee wrote:
With VoIP every line is in the same pipe with little data address tags to ID your conversation or data and to route your conversation to the right place. So to listen to your conversation they have to filter out your conversation from every other conversation in the pipe. With POTS each customer is on a separate wire. POTS may or may not be on a copper pair all the way back to the Central Office. In the old BellSouth area most of the POTS lines are feed by Remote Terminals RTs. RTs are powered by commercial power and when that goes out by backup batteries. They do a great job getting generators hooked up before the batteries give out so you may not lose your phone line. Many people want the POTS line for that rare power failure then they connect a wireless base station to it which is plugged into the house power. They lose their phone service if the don't have a old phone that just plugs in to the phone line. As stated by others they have to get a warrant to listen to your conversation on POTS, VoIP, or Cell phone.
You mean they supposed to get a warrant. Even with POTS, once past the CO it's on to the backbone and through the NSA vault at AT&T. The problem, is there is so much data with POTS, VOIP, messaging, internet, and cell phones, that they can not process it fast enough in real-time, so it's all recorded (and stored indefinately) to go over later. If they then decide that you are a "Person of Interest" they can theoretically make the warrant retroactive and have 3 or 4 years worth of practically everything you did over the phone (of any sort) or on the internet, to hold against you.
That being said, POTS is definately the most reliable (better than 99% uptime in my area) and by far the best thing AT&T does. We had a power outage that lasted 4 and 1/2 days due to a storm and the phone was out for about an hour after the storm while they repaired an overhead cable that looked about 2.5 inch diameter which was taken down by a tree limb. After the repair though, the phone (and my old-style DSL) was back up and running throughout the power outage without further interuption
__________________________________________________________
How can you be in two places at once, when your not anywhere at all?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I really want to become a procrastinator, but I keep putting it off.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are three kinds of people, those that can count, and those that can't.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them." :Bertrand Russell.
