Verizon FiOS - is BGP an option?

Fri Aug 3 20:01:35 UTC 2012

On Aug 3, 2012, at 12:31 , William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 8:51 AM, Seth Mattinen <sethm at rollernet.us> wrote:
>> On 8/3/12 8:56 AM, William Herrin wrote:
>>> It
>>> seems the telcos and cable companies don't consider the commodity
>>> Internet part of their equipment to be something which needs
>>> electricity during an extended grid outage. Cox. Verizon. I'm looking
>>> at you.
>> 
>> Most don't, and for the price being paid on commodity connections I feel
>> indifferent about it.
> 
> Back in the day they kept my land line phone on during extended power
> outages. And that was when they had to power the phone. Now all they
> have to do is power the equipment on their end of the line. My phone's
> out because hey, voip. My Sprint cell phone's out because the fools
> can't power their towers. It's 105 degrees out and I'm screwed if
> someone has a heat stroke because we can't even call 911.
> 
48vDC battery to power your phone up to 3 ringer equivalences was a pretty
light load overall, compared to PON aggregators for all those neighborhoods.
Further, as noted above the PON equipment is much more widely distributed
than powering your phone. Powering your phone was straight DC down the
same copper wire as your service. Powering the PON aggregators, well,
unless you've got some magic new technology for powering them via fiber
is a bit more involved and quite a bit more amperage per conductor than
POTS.

> 
>> The central plant days are mostly gone; there's
>> fiber huts everywhere and not enough trucks/manpower (in my area a
>> lineman sits in his truck and reads a book while tethered to the power
>> kiosk) to run them all if the outage is too widespread for too long.
> 
> They put a quarter million dollars into the fiber hut. They can't put
> a $500 gasoline generator in a warehouse 50 miles away and go pick it
> up when there's an extended outage?

That's a lot of generators and a lot of people to go pull them out and make
sure they don't walk off during said extended outage.

> I'll give Verizon a little credit. They restored service after about
> 12 hours of outage. Cox didn't restore service until 12 hours *after*
> my power came back on.
> 

Seems pretty reasonable to me given the scale of the outage.

> Could be worse. I could have Pepco instead of Dominion. But it could
> be better. And 20 years ago the reliability was.

20 years ago you didn't have a megabit to your home let alone many
megabits. 20 years ago, POTS was much simpler than the converged
networks we have today. There is something to be said for the simplicity
of POTS.

If you're that concerned about calling 911 for a heat stroke, why don't
you maintain a POTS line?

Owen