Backup Power for Cox [or other] ISP [Telecom]

Since so many people rely on the Internet for all kinds of communications, this seems archaic. Supposing there was a medical or other serious emergency and you could not use your VOIP service to call 911? Or connectivity to your burglar alarm or medical devices were interrupted at a time when those services were most needed?

The Internet is no longer just for amusement. It hasn't been for a very long time. It is the primary way we communicate in the world today. Most of us absolutely depend upon it for many things. Reliability is a must and more so for some than others.

Burglar alarms and medical devices should not be on VoIP, period. They should ALWAYS be on a copper landline. In fact, they should specifically be on loop start lines. I believe federal law mandates businesses use loop start lines as opposed to ground start trunks for such critical equipment because that ensures they still operate in a mains power outage.

The Internet was never designed to be reliable like the phone network was. Connectivity could go down at any time. Most businesses that have gone to VoIP keep a landline for precisely this reason.

On the flipside, you can always use dial-up Internet in a mains power outage, regardless of whether your broadband works or not, IF you have a UPS. So you will still have some connectivity, but through a different ISP.

If the Internet is your primary way of communicating, fine, but it should not be relied upon 100%. Landlines have 99.999% uptime, the Internet can't compete with that. They often work even in earthquakes and hurricanes. Bottom line is you should be putting anything critical

- 911, medical devices, etc. - on a landline, not on VoIP. VoIP can go out at any time for any number of reasons beyond your control. Mains power is irrelevant if you have equipment connected to a landline.

***** Moderator's Note *****

It's summer, and everyone is asleep in the shade. I hope this will still the air a bit.

Bill Horne Moderator

Er - 100 watts = 100VA [ignoring power factor].

Either my arithmetic is wrong or 600VA would power you for ~6 min.

My ISP is Spectrum. When power is out in my neighborhood the gray cable boxes on the phone poles switch to battery power which is good for 2 or

3 hours. After 3 hours the batteries are depleted and everything goes out.

My solution is to use a home router that fails back to a cellular service Internet tethering device.

Small UPS's don't run very long on battery. They are designed to run no longer than 10 - 15 minutes tops to allow for controlled shutdown of your computer equipment.

I use an older Tripplite SmartPro Net 2000 VA UPS that is connected to all the computer gear including cable modem and router in my home office. It has external battery boxes that can be plugged into the UPS in parallel and extend run time. Not a cheap solution but gives me over one hour of run time for everything in the office with a single pair of 35 amp 12v batteries wired in series for 24 volts total. Adding additional battery boxes would increase run time.

Usually by the 45 minute mark I switch over to running a gasoline powered generator.

Steve

73 de N2UBP

In article you write:

I agree, but even copper landlines aren't what they used to be. My landline is wired copper back to the central office, which I know because the CO is three blocks away and I can see the wire up on the poles. The CO has a large battery bank and a generator on a trailer that they can start up when the power is out for more than an hour or so.

People out in the country get their service from concentrators (often called SLCs after an old Bell model) which are battery powered. The batteries don't last forever and the plans to recharge them during an outage are spotty.

R's, John

***** Moderator's Note *****

Older readers might think of a "Concentrator" as an electromechanical device - a micro crossbar exchange - which could be used to select CO lines for handling by an answering service, or as a measure to postpone maintenance on outside plant by denying dialtone to customers when no pairs were available for their calls.

The Subsciber Loop Carrier system, or SLC, is called a "Slick." It is a T-Carrier system, fed either by wire or fiber, which is often installed in new apartment buildings and businesses. Although it save on outside plant costs (with either a 1-to-24 or 1-to-48 fanout, depending on options), it is not a concentrator, since all subscribers are able to use it simultaneously.

Bill Horne Moderator

Do POTS lines still get power from batteries or gensets at the central office? I gather they did "once upon a time", but is that still true?

Thanks for reading,

bob prohaska

Germany has been migrating its telephone infrastructure to outdoor cabinets ("Fiber to the curb") to allow for faster DSL on the now shorter tail ends (up to 100 Mbit downstream is in wide deployment with 400 Mbit beginning its test phase this month), and of course to be able to sell off the buildings that used to house the telephone switches and are usually located in locations that are very valuable as a property.

I have put my local infrastructure on a UPS as part of overvoltage protection and witnessed a five minute power outage last week (which does happen _really_ seldomly in Germany, it's usually an item in the local paper when it happens). I was devastated to find out that the DSL went down together with the power and took two minutes longer than the power to return (DSLAMs need to boot up, too), proving that the incumbent hadn't bothered to put _any_ kind of uninterruptible power into the outdoor cabinet, not even a short period battery.

And there goes the telephone network as reliable infrastructure.

Greetings Marc

+--------------- | Naveen Albert wrote: | > On the flipside, you can always use dial-up Internet in a mains power | > outage, | | Do POTS lines still get power from batteries or gensets at the central | office? I gather they did "once upon a time", but is that still true? +---------------

Yes... and no. While many POTS lines are still directly connected to and powered by the CO [which usually has both batteries & backup generators], these days an increasing number of "POTS" lines are connected via remote concentrators (SLC/USLC/ISLCRCU/RLC):

which power the "POTS" lines and in turn are powered by whatever power utility is local to the remote concentrator. Such remote concentrators (usually) contain *some* backup battery capability, but it is often woefully small compared to what is needed in a major power outage due to weather, fire, traffic accident, etc. Providing 6 hours or less of backup is not unusual.

-Rob

+--------------------------------------------------------------+ Rob Warnock 627 26th Avenue San Mateo, CA 94403

600 VA means he has 6x the power budget needed (less the power factor)

- which is probably enough to handle a power on surge....

The duration that the UPS can maintain that 600 VA (or the total stored power) is a separate item in the datasheet.

If the time the UPS can handle is rated at full load then running at

100 VA instead of 600 means the UPS can keep the system running for roughly 6x as long.

- - Stephen

***** Moderator's Note *****

The specifications for this model of UPS are at -

Depending on load, it has runtimes between 6.1 minutes and 1 hour 5 minutes.

Bill Horne Moderator

I don't know about most of the country, but in my area Verizon has made it quite clear publicly it is not interested in maintaining its existing landline network. It actually has abandoned some neighborhoods, telling them to get FIOS or go away.

A neighbor, an elderly man in poor health, lost phone service. It took Verizon ten days to fix it, causing him no end of grief while he waited (including Vz not showing up as promised). In the end, they just switched him to a different cable pair, which is a quick and easy fix.

My landline had trouble and I had similar frustrations with Vz. My community does not have FIOS.

FIOS is no panacea since that requires house current and its backup batteries will fail during an extended power failure. At least my landline kept working during a long power failure (I am close to the C.O., which has generator backup).

Cable phone (provided by Comcast) goes out the minute the power fails, and takes a while to come back. It is not that reliable. Dealing with Comcast is frustrating. Their people all follow pre-written scripts and can't fix anything not covered in the script. A friend lost his Comcast landline and had to wait until a senior technician could come out (the plain tech couldn't fix it).

A big part of the problem today is that everyday consumers no longer care about the high reliability the old Bell System landline used to provide. People want the remote connectivity and bells and whistles of their cell phones. Since texting can work on a delayed basis (unlike a voice conversation), people will tolerate some downtime. Overall, people seem to be content with the lower reliability of cell phones.

***** Moderator's Note *****

I doubt most people would be comfortable with lower reliability if they knew that their insurance rates have gone up as a result. Home insurance underwriters pay close attention to the "Fire Danger Protection Rating" of each neighborhood their employers cover: When the percentage of CO-powered landlines falls, the rates go up.

Bill Horne Moderator

The Bell Labs history 1925-1975 provides detailed information on the above Concentrators. The link was previously posted, but I'll dig it out again if anyone is curious.

Some writers claimed Bell was too liberal in its use of concentrators and how much they loaded onto them - to the extent that subscribers often couldn't get a call out. Given the service problems of the

1960s and 1970s, I think, in some areas, there is some truth to that. ***** Moderator's Note *****

In Massachusetts, the legislature was more concerned with *where* the concentrators were being placed: mostly in low-income, high-crime sections. They were known as "two-man areas" to the outside plant crews, because there were always two employess on any truck dispatched there.

My aunt lived in such an area - the Columbia Point housing project in Dorchester. I lifted her phone once when I was visiting, and heard a busy signal: she explained that it meant there weren't any wires ready to place the call, and that I'd have to wait. I told her that it was unfair and that she should complain. She thought that was very funny.

Bill Horne Moderator

I respectfully disagree.

POTS line are slowly going the way of the dinosaur.

How many of you continue to push antiquated technology to your customers?

We should be able to rely on the new technology and the providers should provide backup power so that their service continues to operate in the event of a power failure.

If the customer wishes to provide a UPS or other means of keeping his/her hone network devices going in the event of a power failure, that would be their responsibility.

Many would be quite OK with providing their own backup power when it is needed.

Let us always remember that the chain is no stronger than its weakest link. If their customer provides backup power on their home network and the network goes down when there is an area wide power outage [or local power outage to the area if the provider's facilities] then their customer invests in backup that is only half a loaf towards keeping the network up when a power outage occurs. Of course, I already stated that in a previous post.

The last thing I would ever lean on is outdated [or nearly outdated] technology.

To Bob Prohaska: POTS is a service that is generally a loop start line in a residence or small business. Loop start (by definition) will always provide power (negative battery] on the ring of the circuit as long as POTS lines are still around. Of course, even those are slowly going away.

Fred

For Fred:

I respectfully disagree with your respectfully disagreeing.

I don't know where you live, but that's generally not the case. Usage is declining yes, and some large telcos. would love to get rid of them because it's expensive for them, but you can always choose to get a POTS line. The primary reason they are "going away" is because people like you think they are.

This seems contrary to how technology works these days. Technology these days is made to be cheap, disposable, and mains power reliant.

Nobody's forcing you to. You can use all the fandangled new technology which nevers works in a crisis. But even 911 centers advise people to keep a landline. One day, cord-cutters will pay the price.

The idea that old technology is outdated is a little absurd. Electric lights are about as old as POTS lines. The power grid is too. Pencil and paper are even older. Yet, nobody considers those things "outdated".

The 1960s and 1970s were tough time for both Bell and the independents.

Below is a link to a discussion from January about payphone vandalism:

IMHO, the excessive time and money phone companies had to spend to repairing vandalism to its infrastructure and security (like two-man crews) contributed to the service crises of the 1970s.

Many of the "new" technology isn't better, it is just shuffling the money to somebody else now.

Eg. my company decided my hybrid digital PBX wasn't worth it, so for even more MRC, they pushed VoIP on us, and if I get more employees in this office, the MRC will go up even more. It has less features. Eg. we used to be able to do modem testing and FAX's. Now we have to buy an external crappy FAX service whose website looks and acts like it will only work with Internet Explorer 6. We used to have crystal clear conference calling, now we have to again buy external conference bridges that sound like crap and have major delays. (I'm not the one buying these services unfortunately).

So, for far more money monthly, we shuffled the money onto the "new players" in the market, for far less reliability, usability, etc. because everybody has to be VoIP.

Its all about the profit margin now-a-days. We aren't going back to the time when things were built to last forever, and be as robust as possible. You say providers *should* do this, but we live in the age of "it works good enough most of the time", and this is never going to happen because there isn't enough demand for it.

The maintenance of keeping a UPS for communication services at a typical residence is way beyond the capabilities of most consumers. ie. UPS batteries need to be replaced every 3 to 5 years, and most UPSs are horrible at methods used to say when the battery needs to be replaced (ie. APC units tend to just drop power on the protected side). What would the typical consumer do? Probably unplug the UPS and throw it away, leaving them without any of it. -- Doug McIntyre snipped-for-privacy@themcintyres.us

***** Moderator's Note *****

As has been pointed out in the past, "UPS" devices are *NOT* intended to provide power for any longer than it takes to shut the computer down gracefully, i.e., without losing data. Anything longer than a few minutes requires a power source, such as a generator, that can run indefinitely.

Bill Horne Moderator

...

...

UPS assemblies come in a huge range of capabilities, and that includes the run time supported by the batteries used. I worked on one at the US Government Printing Office (GPO): it was a conversion of the gigantic wet cells in the basement from supplying nothing but emergency lighting to supplying a huge UPS system that would keep the printing presses' controllers from forgetting what they were doing when power was lost. That would prevent very large amounts of waste caused by starting large print jobs over from scratch.

I also worked on a UPS system that included a 20 foot diameter flywheel and a forward only clutch. The electric motor which turned that flywheel was a genuine monster. The 2 parallel back up generators were designed to come up to full operating voltage and current in 2 minutes. At full designed load that flywheel would not let the power fall more than 0.50 Hertz out from 60.0 Hertz for 5 minutes. We often joked that if anything ever happened to that set of bearings that people 25 miles away might be crushed. When you are supplying computer arrays which bill communications satellite usage time you do not allow the power to falter. Now that was a UPS!