Comcast outages continue even in areas with PG&E power restored

Brandon Martin lists.nanog at monmotha.net
Sat Oct 12 01:54:17 UTC 2019


On 10/11/19 9:43 PM, Matt Hoppes wrote:
> And this is why the distributed nature of small node’s is detrimental in an extended power outage.
> 
> There is no practical way to back them up with power for an extended period of time.

How distributed is the power on a typical HFC system in practice?  I'm 
sure I'm missing some of them, but having walked out most of a small-ish 
(~2000 residences) city recently for a FTTx deployment, I think I only 
saw 2-3 power nodes on Comcast's plant.  There were several times as 
many fiber-coax nodes being line-powered off the coax plant though still 
surprisingly few (the plant is ancient and hasn't seen a lot of fiber 
overbuild).

That's comparable to how many powered RTUs the LEC had in town and many 
fewer utility-powered field nodes than would have been present if it had 
been in AT&T Lightspeed territory.

Now, I have no idea what the backup line power is in practice on that 
Comcast plant.  I know that Bright House/Spectrum, in an another area 
I've supported, has very little backup on many residential-only parts of 
their plant.  I've observed that they have, in practice, maybe 15-30 
minutes of hold-up before DOCSIS nodes start dropping.
-- 
Brandon Martin



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