Battery lifetimes RE: East Coast outage?

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

Speaking on Deep Background, the Press Secretary whispered:

Thanks. A couple of people told me that the target is 8hrs for Bell Canada
huts. So hopefully some power will make it there before long. Not sure how
well they will prioritize what huts to charge with portable gensets. I
imagine they dont of course have a portable genset for every hut out there.

This is the dark stepchild of the modern telco decentralization.
CO's have -48v everywhere, & Diesels (or turbines) to keep
their -48v strings up. Further, it used to be the LEC had a
truck-mounted semi generator ready to move in case the CO one
failed.

But 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.

Then there's the issue that generators in dark areas tend to
grow legs, no matter how well nailed down.

Hope you folks have flashlights..

2

Once upon a time, David Lesher <wb8foz@nrk.com> said:

But 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.

We've got BellSouth and KMC in our POP. BellSouth has batteries
(because they were already there); KMC does not, but they are on our
UPS. Both are covered by our generator.

All of the outside cabinets I've seen BellSouth install around town
(Huntsville, AL; BellSouth appears to be working hard to get all copper
lines out of the COs so lots of remote fiber cabinets) in recent years
have included a natural gas hookup, which I'm assuming is for an
internal generator. We haven't had an extended power failure here in
several years, so I don't know for sure, but it looks like BellSouth has
their network prepared for long term power outages (as long as the NG
supply keeps going).