Hurricane highlights importance of phone reliability

On Sunday morning, I called my grandmother in Jacksonville, Fla., to see how she and my aunt had weathered Hurricane Frances coming through the area the day before. Thankfully, they were safe and sound.

But there were plenty of inconveniences and interesting stories to share, many of which revolved around the fact they had been without power since 8:30 p.m. the previous day. The cordless phones throughout my grandmother's house died "within 20 minutes," she said. They had neglected to charge their mobile phones prior to the outage, so those were drained of power relatively soon, as well.

As a result, they sat in the house, believing there was no way to communicate with the outside world. They were not totally alone, because they have several friends within walking distance, but talking with someone outside the subdivision seemed unrealistic.

But early Sunday morning, a phone rang in my late grandfather's room -- the only traditional phone in the house. My grandmother said she was genuinely surprised by the sound, because she just assumed the phones were dead.

Fortunately, this assumption was not a problem for my relatives, who were perfectly healthy. But a similar assumption could have been tragic if an emergency call had been necessary -- something I'm sure happened to others last week and could be repeated next week with Hurricane Ivan.

The episode serves as a stark reminder about how far newer, feature-rich technologies like voice over IP have to go to provide the kind of reliability we've come to expect from the legacy phone system. Not only do the next-generation networks need power backups, so do the devices themselves -- especially phones, although some might argue that having a working TV also would be helpful in harsh storms.

Should it be mandated via regulation for all devices? I don't think so, because that would limit the market. However, an argument can made that at least one phone in a household should be resistant to power outages. After all, even if my relatives were fine, someone may have been tempted to put themselves in harm's way by trying to go to their home to check up on them, driven by the inability to communicate via phone.

At the very least, there should be an easy method for consumers to understand the power-backup capabilities of the network services and devices they purchase. A special logo -- similar to the energy savings star or the "Intel Inside" moniker -- would be a nice start.

E-mail me at djackson@primediabusiness.com.