North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Telecom Collapse?

  • From: Jack Bates
  • Date: Thu Dec 04 11:47:18 2008
Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Paul Stewart <[email protected]> said: 
What worries me the most is a power outage longer than say 8 hours.
This is the typical battery time at most cell sites, telco remotes and
many telco CO's.  Beyond those 8 hours, it's quite probable that the
site will go down and you'll have no cell or landline anyways.


The AT&T (BellSouth) remotes around here installed in the last 10 years
or so typically have natural gas generators installed, and the COs have
a pair of generators for redundancy.  Even many of the cell towers have
generators.  The telco infrastructure is pretty well backed up (I don't
know how well tested any of it is of course).

The ILECs that use my service have generators at the large sites and a number of generator trucks to make rounds recharging remote battery systems. Quite a few of them have permanent generators installed to power one or more remotes in the field. Some are still using remote power technologies on their remotes.

The storm that blacked out northern Oklahoma a couple of years ago left some towns without services for over a month. The phone system itself was impacted in a few of the ILECs, but they never dropped below 80% and most of that was due to actual line damage, not power. A few of the ILECS effected didn't even blink the entire time.

That being said, most small ILECs can cope better with the costs. It's easier to manage < 10 towns than it is to manage 100+ towns.

On the other hand, it appears that the cable infrastructure doesn't even
all have batteries (I know some people whose cable voice and data
services blink with the power).

None of the cable services I know of around here can make 8 hours, much less 1-6 weeks. Such outages are rare, but they do happen and Oklahoma takes more than it's fair share. Lots of modems support battery backup, but the cable plant itself is prone to power outages.


Jack