North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Even the New York Times withholds the address

  • From: blitz
  • Date: Tue Nov 19 14:29:15 2002 


This is a good example of an area where governments can intervene and do
some good.



Ugh..I contend they never improve a situation, only make it worse.





1. Local governments can prohibit fuel storage and generators at telecom
sites.




Telecom/Datacom sites would leave. period. You would be at a distinct
disadvantage to the providers who DID have backup power. You would leave
just after your customers did.






2. Local governments can make it easy for telecom site operators to set up
local generators and store fuel at sites that are near the telecom sites
but not too near.




You have to run either fuel lines or power cables, take your choice.
Imagine the local's reaction to a "Im going to build a big noisy diesel
generator plant, right,...here..."

I'd imagine in dense build situations like NYC its really hard to do
anything more than is being done. This of course cries for decentralization
and moving out and running rings.






Right now, people put the generators and the fuel in the same building
because it is virtually impossible to install your own neighborhood power
cabling. But there are few disaster scenarios in which a PoP would be
undamaged at the same time as the nearby powerstation is out of action or
disconnected.




Transformer failure, underground cable failure, water main failure, street
collapse, all come to mind. Most failures are of the more pedestrian types.
If the entire town goes dark, most customers are dark as well.




 If the local power cable takes a different route from the
power utility's cable then backhoe disease is avoided. If the local
powerstation blows up, we are happy because the PoP is still running on
utility power unlike the current situation.

In fact, a single municipality could plan this as an integral part of
their telecom infrastructure so that there are multiple telecom hotels
spread far enough apart to avoid fate sharing and each one of them could
be served by two local power stations, each of which serves several
telecom hotels. These would also be spread apart to avoid fate sharing
with utility power substations and cabling.




Problem is there isn't a whole lot of new planned building going on, most
"hotels' are retrofits of older structures, their location such because of
their proximity to the customer base/infrastructure. Youre stuck with
what's available, and then limited by the particular building's design etc.

In an ideal world there would be redundant power, water, sewer, fuel,
served at two or more entrance points at each building, everyone would
connect to each other via multiple access points on opposite sides of their
buildings..everything else is a mitigation of the lack of a perfect solution.






If you were offered a colo facility that supplied AC power from one
utility and two local generator substation sources, would you rate this
better or worse than a colo facility that contained its own in-house
generators and fuel storage tanks?




Unless the costs/difficulty of providing multiple connections to different
substations goes dramatically down for some reason, you're going to be
stuck with the incumbent power provider and a genny. Local control over
your means of backup power generation, for maintenance and reliability is
always preferential. If it doesn't work, and its my fault, its one thing,
if it doesn't work when I need it and its someone else's job to provide it,
all that happens is shysters get rich.




P.S. What if the colo facility offered built-in water chillers for cooling
with all the water piped downhill, down the block to a cooling tower?
Would this be better or safer than existing systems? Could it possibly be
built this way without municipal government involvement?




Doubt it. Any time major construction of that type comes into play,
municipalities want their piece.



Marc