>> The decreasing resiliency of the phone system to power failures is a
>> real problem that nobody seems to be addressing.
>> It used to be all basic telephones were powered by the central office
>> which had diesel generators to recharge the batteries in case of
>> commercial failure. While the likelihood of a power failure is fairly
>> low, nasty storms or power company failures do create local outages
>> that can last for 24-48 hours. During such an outage telephone
>> service is especially critical since roads may be blocked. PBXs had
>> batteries and hand generators for ringing.
>> It seems most people at home have cordless phones powered by house
>> current. How long, if at all, will such phones last in a power
>> failure? People are supposed to have a plain landline phone, but do >> they?
>> But I wonder today how many business PBXs have any battery backup at
>> all for both talk and ringing, especially for an extended period of >> time.
> A quick and cheap fix for a small to medium sized business is to run
> the first two CO pairs up to the receptionist's desk, connect them to
> modular jacks and leave a couple of POTS unplugged under the desk for
> emergencies. I've done this at a couple places where I worked and it
> was greatly appreciated.
In our situation the switch is in the computer room. The entire room is hooked into an APC Symmetra that provides about 45 minutes of power. That is backed up by a 125kW natural gas fired generator that spools up and comes online within 10 seconds.
We did learn that while we tried to cover every contingency, we couldn't cover all of them. Like our DNS services -- they came from another agency and when a city wide power outage hit, we were up and running but couldn't communicate.