On Aug 3, 2012, at 12:31 , William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 8:51 AM, Seth Mattinen <sethm@rollernet.us> wrote:

...

On 8/3/12 8:56 AM, William Herrin wrote:

...

It seems the telcos and cable companies don't consider the commodity Internet part of their equipment to be something which needs electricity during an extended grid outage. Cox. Verizon. I'm looking at you.

Most don't, and for the price being paid on commodity connections I feel indifferent about it.

Back in the day they kept my land line phone on during extended power outages. And that was when they had to power the phone. Now all they have to do is power the equipment on their end of the line. My phone's out because hey, voip. My Sprint cell phone's out because the fools can't power their towers. It's 105 degrees out and I'm screwed if someone has a heat stroke because we can't even call 911.

48vDC battery to power your phone up to 3 ringer equivalences was a pretty light load overall, compared to PON aggregators for all those neighborhoods. Further, as noted above the PON equipment is much more widely distributed than powering your phone. Powering your phone was straight DC down the same copper wire as your service. Powering the PON aggregators, well, unless you've got some magic new technology for powering them via fiber is a bit more involved and quite a bit more amperage per conductor than POTS.

...

The central plant days are mostly gone; there's fiber huts everywhere and not enough trucks/manpower (in my area a lineman sits in his truck and reads a book while tethered to the power kiosk) to run them all if the outage is too widespread for too long.

They put a quarter million dollars into the fiber hut. They can't put a $500 gasoline generator in a warehouse 50 miles away and go pick it up when there's an extended outage?

That's a lot of generators and a lot of people to go pull them out and make sure they don't walk off during said extended outage.

I'll give Verizon a little credit. They restored service after about 12 hours of outage. Cox didn't restore service until 12 hours *after* my power came back on.

Seems pretty reasonable to me given the scale of the outage.

Could be worse. I could have Pepco instead of Dominion. But it could be better. And 20 years ago the reliability was.

20 years ago you didn't have a megabit to your home let alone many megabits. 20 years ago, POTS was much simpler than the converged networks we have today. There is something to be said for the simplicity of POTS. If you're that concerned about calling 911 for a heat stroke, why don't you maintain a POTS line? Owen ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE