What does POTS mean and how does it work with ADSL as a newly featured product?
POTS is an acronym for Plain Old Telephone Service. POTS lines, which generally consist of two to four wires, are what we use every day to place phone calls and make analog connections to the Internet. DSL also uses POTS lines for Internet connectivity but with a different method. The difference in transfer speeds and overall functionality of the analog versus DSL does not reside in the line. Instead, the difference in product performance has to do with the difference in the line frequencies used for analog versus DSL (analog uses 3.4 kHz, while DSL uses up to 1.2 MHz), the equipment (analog modem versus an NIC, bridge, and splitter combination), and the Network configuration (circuit switch network versus cell relay network).
