There will always be exceptions to the rule. Nature can be quite ugly to service infrastructure and the best service providers can do is pull double duty to get services back up as quickly as possible. As you said, cellular was torn up pretty badly, but then again so was the power grid and the hardened POTS infrastructure. You make a good point about the data lines that feed cell towers. Of the cell site outages I have dealt with, every one of them was due to data line loss. phb On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 10:54 AM, Jack Bates <jbates@brightok.net> wrote:
Paul Bosworth wrote:
On a personal note, when I worked in telecom I never once saw a cell tower that was down due to power loss. Every tower I have worked with had some form of power generation, be it natural gas or diesel. In addition, as a cellular service consumer I have also never experienced an outage due to cellular tower power loss.
The nasty Oklahoma outage a few years ago wiped out cellular big time. In some cases it was due to power loss, in others it was loss of the backend fiber/T1's feeding it. I know one town that lost every service except for POTS, though it didn't help much since people were living elsewhere to stay warm.
Of course, life gets fun in rural America.
Jack
-- Paul H Bosworth CCNP, CCNA, CCDA