North American Network Operators Group

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Re: SLC power failures

  • From: Brett Frankenberger
  • Date: Thu Jan 04 10:21:07 2001

> 
> Yep... The theory is, the RBOC has portable generators to deploy
> as needed. There's a male plug on each to receive same. That
> works fine for local failures (truck hits power line..). But
> in a widespread debacle, say Hurricane Andrew, earthquake, ice
> storm, etc... they have nowhere near enough, nor can they get
> them deployed fast enough if they did.

About three years ago, Omaha, NE, had a snow/ice storm resulting in
multi-day power outages in some areas.  One of my friends noticed the
local cable company (Cox), which is also a CLEC offering service over
their own plant (i.e. not renting loops from the RBOC) and has
equipment in various remote cabinets with batteries and no generators,
going from cabinet to cabinet running the generator long enough to
charge the batteries (for some values of charge).  They managed to keep
his service up, although his area was only down for about 18 - 24 hours
(I have no information good or bad anout other areas).  Doing so is
certainly labor intensive, and I don't know what cabinet-to-generator
ratio is needed to make that work (how long to you have to charge the
batteries to get an hour of runtime? -- I would think the batteries
could take charge in at a rate higher than the rate normally used by
the equipment in the cabinet ... but I don't know how much higher), but
it did manage to keep service up in at least this one acecdotal case.

     -- Brett