Yep... The theory is, the RBOC has portable generators to deploy as needed. There's a male plug on each to receive same. That works fine for local failures (truck hits power line..). But in a widespread debacle, say Hurricane Andrew, earthquake, ice storm, etc... they have nowhere near enough, nor can they get them deployed fast enough if they did.
About three years ago, Omaha, NE, had a snow/ice storm resulting in multi-day power outages in some areas. One of my friends noticed the local cable company (Cox), which is also a CLEC offering service over their own plant (i.e. not renting loops from the RBOC) and has equipment in various remote cabinets with batteries and no generators, going from cabinet to cabinet running the generator long enough to charge the batteries (for some values of charge). They managed to keep his service up, although his area was only down for about 18 - 24 hours (I have no information good or bad anout other areas). Doing so is certainly labor intensive, and I don't know what cabinet-to-generator ratio is needed to make that work (how long to you have to charge the batteries to get an hour of runtime? -- I would think the batteries could take charge in at a rate higher than the rate normally used by the equipment in the cabinet ... but I don't know how much higher), but it did manage to keep service up in at least this one acecdotal case. -- Brett