long-haul fiber all stayed up. Most of the other problems were because of the power failure (some local fiber rings dropped, especially one CLEC's that puts their nodes in customer premises and were broken by customers' power failures). [snip] I would go as far as to say most electric utilities I know of specialize in safe efficient long-distance transmission for a mass consumption audience (massive number of users, very few users with specific high reliability requirements who can't accept a 5 day outage at least), and favor safety and efficiency over reliability, using many components that are not buried or heavily shielded, and are highly susceptible to weather events, trucks knocking poles over,
On 8/4/12, Chris Adams <cmadams@hiwaay.net> wrote: lightning, tornados, solar flares, etc, and that their answer to outage prevention is to let it fail, or shut it down in case of damage, and then repair later. If a telco provider's answer to powering remote comms facilities is to just let the electric company bring in AC, to charge a battery which will last a short time, then disaster survivability was not the driving design goal for that selection. Possibly because their customers or their local government weren't demanding it, or weren't willing to pay enough for them to install suitably designed power distribution and backup. If you really care about building a reliable communications infrastructure, then you have at least two independent paths and sources for communications, and at least two independent paths and sources for power, to each major component of the system, so you provide your own power distribution, favoring reliability. That increases the price of the service, and if the consumer doesn't want it so badly that they'll pay significantly more, then it could be a waste, financially; most of the time, people won't notice extra fault tolerance measures versus a competitor's cheaper service that isn't so resilient in disasters. -- -JH