ut all those SONET hubs in basements, SLC's in the burbs and such -- they don't have generators. They have X hours of batteries. In the fine print, it says the LEC will have a portable generator on site before they die.

That's doable if the failure is local; say a semi taking out a power pole. But given anything bigger, a citywide or bigger blackout, a regional ice storm, or whatever.... they do not have the quantity of gensets they'd need, much less the manpower to deploy AND maintain [refuel] same.

Here in the SE we had a little Experience with this EXACT issue back in december. We had a power outage that lasted 4 days. Bellsouth's plan, and it seemed to work, was to hook gensets to a truck run to a battery pack run the generator long enough to recharge the pack and then drop and run to the next one. They started this within an hour or two of the power outage. None of my circuits went down during those days. (We had generator power at our office) This may be a larger, but we had about 2 Million out of power in little ole SC.. IMHO, J