At 09:59 PM 7/24/2006, Frank Bulk wrote:

Depending on the state you live in, the PUC generally requires 4 to 8 hours of dialtone if it's generated from the C.O. Dialtone generated from SLC may not be explicitly covered under the rules.

So when they moved about 1/2 of the town from CO to SLC, they got out of the obligation to provide dial tone in power outage? That seems, ummm, interesting. Will be interesting to see what the police chief learns (I'm on a town board that works closely with the police, so he and I get to talk often and get along well). He was quite concerned to learn about the telephone outages that happen.

Thanks for the info. I will follow up with the PUC folks as well and see what they have to say. The Verizon service folks did tell me they expected dialtone to work during power failures, and kept claiming it must be my telephones that are at fault (plugging a very basic, known-functional POTS phone into the network interface says they're wrong).

Regards,

Frank

From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [ mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Daniel Senie
Sent: Monday, July 24, 2006 5:47 PM
To: Brandon Galbraith
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Subject: Re: Hot weather and power outages continue

At 06:26 PM 7/24/2006, Brandon Galbraith wrote:

While hardwired (fiber/coax/copper) aggregation points usually don't have backup power on them, most cellular towers have either batteries or generators for backup power, correct?

We see good cable modem connectivity during power outages. Batteries must still be good in the HFC nodes in our area. Verizon POTS service, on the other hand, dies when the power does. The batteries in their SLC units are toast. I've got the local police chief off conversing with the Verizon E911 folks to find out why it's OK to have no 911 service to a large part of town when there's no power (Verizon repair kept trying to tell me it must be my equipment, despite testing at the network interface).

I am looking at moving telephone services off to Comcast or VOIP because they're more reliable than Verizon is, in my particular neighborhood.

-brandon

On 7/24/06, William S. Duncanson <caesar@starkreality.com > wrote:

Indeed, my RoadRunner connection is the same way. All of my stuff stays up,
but "teh Interweb is broken." I'm guessing that they (DSL/CableCo's) find it
too cost-prohibitive to roll out UPSes to the customer aggregation points.
Suprisingly, my cable TV goes out as well when the power goes, so it might
just be more than the CMTS that's going out.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [ mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of
Michael Loftis
Sent: Monday, July 24, 2006 16:20
To: nanog@merit.edu
Subject: Re: Hot weather and power outages continue

--On July 24, 2006 2:22:26 AM -0400 Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote:

> While its expected for individual customers to go down during power
> outages, usually because the customer does not have local backup
> power, it is less common for major web sites and co-location centers
> to experience downtime during power outages.

Except if you're in Qwest territory. Apparently they don't put any battery
backup at their mini-DSLAMs and such. Every time we lose power, I'm still
up, but the DSL signal goes away. Haven't checked dialtone, but I keep
meaning too during the next outage.

Now I know it's not exactly fair singling out Qwest, because I'll bet
Verizon and others share the same thing, and I'm pretty sure it's just their
ADSL service and not the voice service (I haven't checked though) it's
still becoming more and more common that as an individual user your
connection to the internet, unless you're paying for something other than
ADSL or Cable, will be just as affected by local power outages.

--
Brandon Galbraith
Email: brandon.galbraith@gmail.com
AIM: brandong00
Voice: 630.400.6992
"A true pirate starts drinking before the sun hits the yard-arm. Yarrrr. --thelost"