Publicly Available Telephone Services (PATS) means a service available to the public for originating and receiving national and international calls and access to emergency services through a

telephone number A telephone number is a sequence of digits assigned to a landline telephone subscriber station connected to a telephone line or to a wireless electronic telephony device, such as a radio telephone or a mobile telephone, or to other devices f ...

or numbers in a national or international

telephone numbering plan A telephone numbering plan is a type of numbering scheme used in telecommunication to assign telephone numbers to subscriber telephones or other telephony endpoints. Telephone numbers are the addresses of participants in a telephone network, re ...

, and may, where relevant, also include one or more of the following: * (a)

operator assistance Operator assistance refers to a telephone call in which the calling party requires an operator to provide some form of assistance in completing the call. This may include telephone calls made from pay phones, calls placed station-to-station, per ...

, * (b)

directory assistance In telecommunications, directory assistance or directory inquiries is a phone service used to find out a specific telephone number and/or address of a residence, business, or government entity. Technology Directory assistance systems incorporate ...

facilities, * (c)

directories Directory may refer to: * Directory (computing), or folder, a file system structure in which to store computer files * Directory (OpenVMS command) * Directory service, a software application for organizing information about a computer network's ...

, * (d)

pay telephone A payphone (alternative spelling: pay phone) is typically a coin-operated public telephone, often located in a telephone booth or in high-traffic outdoor areas, with prepayment by inserting money (usually coins) or by billing a credit or debit ...

s, * (e) service under special terms, * (f) specific facilities for end-users with a disability or with special social needs, and * (g) non-geographic services

Resilience

plain old telephone service Plain old telephone service (POTS), or plain ordinary telephone system, is a retronym for voice-grade telephone service employing analog signal transmission over copper loops. POTS was the standard service offering from telephone companies from 1 ...

has high reliability and is unlikely to be affected by local

power outage A power outage (also called a powercut, a power out, a power failure, a power blackout, a power loss, or a blackout) is the loss of the electrical power network supply to an end user. There are many causes of power failures in an electricity ...

s. More modern systems require battery back-up to guard against local power outages. The United Kingdom telephone regulator, Ofcom, has published a guidance note for

telephone service provider A telephone company, also known as a telco, telephone service provider, or telecommunications operator, is a kind of communications service provider (CSP), more precisely a telecommunications service provider (TSP), that provides telecommunicat ...

s: "Protecting access to emergency organisations when there is a power cut at the customer’s premises".https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/123118/guidance-emergency-access-power-cut.pdf

References

Telephone services {{telephony-stub

Resilience

See also

References