Back in the days of landline POTS telephony (plain old telephone service, without data) six people died annually in the US while talking on the phone in a thunderstorm. That’s right — half a dozen folks met their end getting zapped by their telephone in a storm. The Old Wive’s Tale from the time was true. Of course, now that most everyone’s phone is wireless that’s a thing of the past, but there are still a lot of wired networks all over the world that use “outside plant” by necessity. The power grid, for one, but there are others. And they are all at risk for lightning strikes that can carry into your home or office and have rather…unpleasant…consequences.

In my younger days, I spent my time in research and development laboratories, first doing fiber optics applications with medium powered lasers, then later, in regular telephony materials research. One of the areas of focus my team worked on were low cost novel materials for lightning protection down phone lines, including on the side of homes where the telco networks interfaced with the customer’s premises wiring. There was a device called a NID, short for network interface device, where the lines joined. And there, we were working on a resettable lightning fuse that would short if a certainly energy level was reached and then reset itself automatically.