UPS & Vonage?

Posts: 23 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jun 21, 2005 Posts: 23

I'm curious to know if the Vonage phone service will contiue to work if the power to the house goes out but a UPS being connected to the modem and router.

Anyone have any experiences or comments regarding this?

Posts: 644 · Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2005 11:15 pm Post subject:

It works, but only as long as your Internet connection stays up. DSL tends to be better than Cable in that regard. My cable seems to last about an hour after the power goes out.

Posts: 1715 · Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2005 12:32 am Post subject:

An hour? wow...consider yourself lucky. My old Comcrap cable connection died at any blink of the power whatsoever. Usually took about 5 mins for it to come back after any power hit.

Posts: 46 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jun 03, 2005 Posts: 46

I guess working as an installations technician for the cable company helps but I have a APC Back-Ups XS 1500 with an extra battery pack and have about 150 minutes of runtime and my UPS runs out just minutes before my battery powered TV goes static.

I do have a APC 350 and tried it. There is a difference with the sinewave output between the two.
The 1500 has a modified sine wave and the 350 does not and you can hear it through the phone with the 350, a buzzing and it is difficult to hear and be heard.

So with that if you are going to use a UPC you will want to spend the extra money on the better regulated units. Not some small cheap one because you may have the buzzing in your ear if you do.

Posts: 1715 · Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2005 11:17 am Post subject:

The problem I've had with Comcrap is that everything in my building is on generator power, but their lines out along the street use power from the utility, so once utility power dies, there goes all of the cable signal. Guess they do it differently elsewhere.

Re: APC UPS, I was told by APC that the Smart-UPS & Symmetra series had pure sine wave output and the rest were modified square wave. I've thrown my Smart-UPS on the oscilloscope before and it does have a pretty clean output, sometimes better than the utility. All of the BackUPS I've seen put out a rather ratty modified square wave (ain't no way I'm going to call that sine wave). Maybe the 350 doesn't sound as bad b/c it's not being driven as hard (or is being driven harder? I'm not sure of the response curves on these). Of course, the best way to do battery backup on this type of stuff is to power the equipment straight DC, tossing out the DC->AC->DC conversion. No switchover time on the cheaper UPS (the better ones are on battery 24/7) and more efficient.

Posts: 644 · Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2005 11:23 am Post subject:

Edit: didn't see the above post while writing this...

You'll get the cleanest power and longest runtime by just wiring a 12V battery directly into the modem and Vonage box (assuming they both need 12V). Why worry about perfect sine waves when all you really need is DC?

The biggest problem is that if you wanted to make it permanent, you'd have to find an appropriate unit to keep the battery charged properly. I imagine that's not as easy to obtain as a standard UPS.