Surge Protection

Thu Jul 22 20:25:57 UTC 2004

A good principle is to only let fiber links into your buildings.
This is especially a good idea with roof mounted satellite or
P2P microwave links, which otherwise are basically lightening rods
attached to your routers / rf equipment / whatever. I thought this
was a PITA when I first encountered it with the Navy but it
works and saves a lot of grief.

On Jul 22, 2004, at 1:06 PM, Daniel Senie wrote:

>
> At 11:56 AM 7/22/2004, you wrote:
>
>> Have anyone experienced hardware failure related to electrical spikes 
>> coming into your datacenters or equipment locations via the telco 
>> facilities?  I am referring specifically to copper facilities for 
>> DS1's, etc.  I know that the telco must maintain good grounding, but 
>> sometimes when you get hit with a few Gigavolts worth of electrical 
>> energy not much will help you.  Whatever the case, has anyone had any 
>> experience good or otherwise with surge protection for their Telcom 
>> circuits?  I am looking at this unit below as a possible solution.
>
> Rule #1, don't trust the telco or the power company, or anyone else 
> feeding wires into your building to do a good job keeping you safe 
> from surges.
>
> A client of mine has what used to be a CSU/DSU... now has surface 
> mount components missing and the like. They hadn't installed a surge 
> protector on the T-1. They had covered the power and the antenna 
> coaxes at the site. Only the T-1 line was unprotected. Lightning will 
> find that one path you've not protected.
>
> The cost of installing a surge protector is unlikely to impact your 
> bottom line. One successful lightning strike on the other hand will 
> hurt quite a bit, and probably happen at 4AM just to be more annoying.
>
                                  Regards
                                  Marshall Eubanks