Access Points As Lightning RodsAccess Points As Lightning Rods

Should access points be plugged into IP telephones?

Recently, I had a call from a customer trying to figure out why just one section of one building in the campus was down--only the phones were down, not the LAN.Upon arriving I spoke to the receptionist first to find out what happened. Receptionists and operators are like bird dogs of an organization. I'm glad I spoke to her first because she saved me hours of unnecessary work. The previous Friday the school suffered a lightning strike that shook the building and afterwards staff and students heard continued popping noises.

All the protection gear in the closet serving the dead phones tested okay as did the UPS. The LAN switch was unscathed but the remote PoE power supply for the IP phones was dead. As I started out to inspect the phones I got another break and met one of the campus staffers in the hall who led me to what she described as "the most critical phone." She explained, "we must get a phone working here because of after hour call-ins and we need our wireless." Wireless? She showed me a retail access point that was plugged into a receptacle (unprotected) with the WAN port patched to the PC port of a wall mounted IP telephone. The AC receptacle was burned up and not working, the access point was toasted, the IP phone was dead and the remote power supply connected to it in the closet was fried too. Once the campus maintenance manager showed up, he showed me that the wall mounted IP phone was connected by way of a 50-foot patch cable--it too was burned. We traced the patch cable to the faceplate in the ceiling of a teacher's closet. We swapped the phone and got it working to the teacher's closet using a single port PoE injector.

Because you can doesn't mean you should and because they (the customer) did patch a device unprotected into the IP phone, it meant serious disruption and unnecessary costly repairs. Later we were told that they (the staff) did connect the access point to the phone as a temporary measure and that was over two years ago. Lightning season begins with a bang and we always get the really interesting service calls. It's an old song but it needs repeating--anything you plug into the network that is electrically powered must be protected. But even so, should access points be plugged into IP telephones? I thought network printers plugged into IP phones were disastrous but I think access points connected to IP phones give new meaning to lightning rods.Should access points be plugged into IP telephones?