North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Surge Protection

  • From: Marshall Eubanks
  • Date: Thu Jul 22 16:27:57 2004 
A good principle is to only let fiber links into your buildings.
This is especially a good idea with roof mounted satellite or
P2P microwave links, which otherwise are basically lightening rods
attached to your routers / rf equipment / whatever. I thought this
was a PITA when I first encountered it with the Navy but it
works and saves a lot of grief.


On Jul 22, 2004, at 1:06 PM, Daniel Senie wrote:


At 11:56 AM 7/22/2004, you wrote:
Have anyone experienced hardware failure related to electrical spikes coming into your datacenters or equipment locations via the telco facilities? I am referring specifically to copper facilities for DS1's, etc. I know that the telco must maintain good grounding, but sometimes when you get hit with a few Gigavolts worth of electrical energy not much will help you. Whatever the case, has anyone had any experience good or otherwise with surge protection for their Telcom circuits? I am looking at this unit below as a possible solution.
Rule #1, don't trust the telco or the power company, or anyone else feeding wires into your building to do a good job keeping you safe from surges.

A client of mine has what used to be a CSU/DSU... now has surface mount components missing and the like. They hadn't installed a surge protector on the T-1. They had covered the power and the antenna coaxes at the site. Only the T-1 line was unprotected. Lightning will find that one path you've not protected.

The cost of installing a surge protector is unlikely to impact your bottom line. One successful lightning strike on the other hand will hurt quite a bit, and probably happen at 4AM just to be more annoying.

                                 Regards
                                 Marshall Eubanks