Telecom Collapse?

Thu Dec 4 16:59:06 UTC 2008

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 at 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