As far as loss of power, a lot depends on your ISP. If it is DSL,
especially from a telco, they probably will back up power for a pretty
long time. Telephone offices are traditionally very well backed up by
batteries, for the short term, and diesels, for the long term. That
said, my ISP is broadband over the cable. When my cables company had
their old tree and branch system, reliability was poor at best during a
power failure. A power failure on one side of town could drop cable
service to everyone downstream and it used to do exactly that; power
would be down in a part of town, not by me, and cable would go down.
Now we have a fiber-based system with remote nodes (mini head ends) and
the power reliability is very good. I have had power failures, running
my backup generator, and the cable was still up and running! I, too, am
interested in VoIP. I am still concerned about small cable dropouts
that seem to occur in the morning when the cable company is doing
maintenance. I'm also concerned about delays that can occur in VoIP. I
asked AT&T, the local VoIP provider, if they use some type of priority
routing through the IP (Comcast), and they really couldn't answer the
question. Typical! I do have a UPS on my cable modem/router/computer,
so that shouldn't be an issue. Anyway, with the high proliferation of
cell phones, the whole power thing is becoming less important. Sorry
for babbling on so long.

Philip Lewis wrote:
"Joe Fabeitz" writes:

If you lose power to the house [...] do VOIP phones still work?

well... if you have a UPS on devices required to make them work.
We have a similar situation with wireless phones. (see below)


If not, how do you call for help / repair?

Cell Phone?

That what we did when we had a fire in the house.
My first reaction after i realized i didn't want to open the door was
to go throw the main breaker. Then we realized the cordless phone
wasn't working. The cell phone was a handy backup.
(I need to get a battery backup for the cordless base unit)

We don't have VOIP, but we have a UPS on the wireless router and DSL
modem. Which means our laptops still function on the network when the
power goes out.

As to barry's original question, I *think* he was asking if he
disconnected the (presumably unused) feed from the telephone company,
and attached the output of a VOIP to standard telephone converter to
that junction box, would it work.

If your VOIP "magic box" was designed to feed a regular phone (plain
old telephone servive == POTS), it sounds like that method will work.
You should research the limit of how many phones the internet/POTS
unit is able to drive. It might only be rated for 1 unit in which
case multiple phones might overload it.