Re: Telecom Collapse?

* Martin List-Petersen · * Thu Dec 04 12:51:43 2008

Daniel Senie wrote:

Mike Lyon wrote:

That makes two of us...
Anyways, for residential VOIP, where are we these days with E911? Are

providers like Vonage and such providing reliable E911 when people

call 911? That is one of the major problems I see with the residential

realm going with VOIP offerings...

Where we are, the SLC units on the telephone poles have batteries. Until

very recently, DEAD batteries. We'd lose power, and the POTS line would

go out. We've got our own genset and UPSs to bridge the gap, so we kept

power, the cable Internet service stayed running, and the Vonage VOIP.

The only thing NOT working was POTS.

We run a fixed wireless business and with modern embedded hardware, that
is designed to be installed on remote sites, like mast sites, we can for
very little money add battery backup for one week (7 days !!) The cost
of that is less than $200 pr. site and would power up to 4 routers easily.
As the west of Ireland has terrible power in the rural areas (as in
daily power cuts), we've implemented the power backup everywhere. A
minimum of 2 days.
In the regular winterstorms, when tree's fall into our overland
telephone cabling, roads get flooded etc., we've had customers telling
us, that the only thing that stays working for them, is the broadband
from us. Some even ask us, how they can power the kit in an emergency
and as our kit runs on anything from 10-28 volt, they can just hook it
up to a car battery.
As for E911 or similar services, as mentioned before, there is always a
cellphone. Any GSM provider is enforced to provide 911/112 services as
part of the license, even to phones that have no sim-card in it. And all
of the phones allow you to call 911 and 112 without a sim-card.
That's for some people, that can't get a phoneline, the only way of
having E911/112 services.
Pots will often fail during powercuts, especially if you are sitting on
a pair gain/multiplexer.
Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
--

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