home router battery backup

Thu Jan 13 17:28:32 UTC 2022

Once upon a time, Brandon Martin <lists.nanog at monmotha.net> said:
> AT&T and Comcast don't seem to provide battery by default if you buy
> voice service from them.

The only major power outage I've experienced at my house (I've been here
over 20 years) was the May 2011 tornado outbreak, when TVA lost hundreds
of distribution towers, and my local utility lost all feeds.  At the
time, I had AT&T POTS, Comcast cable/Internet, and T-Mobile cell.

I have all my stuff on UPS, so I could see for a little while that
Comcast dropped almost immediately; it looked like they had no (or dead)
batteries in their distribution system.  T-Mobile stayed up but got
congested (because lots of people switched to cells for Internet), and
AT&T POTS was up the whole time (they have batteries in all the remotes,
with natural gas generators in a lot of them, and rolled generator
trucks around to charge things up).

I left town the next morning to somewhere with electricity, and came
back several days later, before my power had been restored (it came back
that night).  IIRC Comcast was dead, AT&T was up, and T-Mobile was up
but slow.

I've got Google Fiber now, on local utility fiber, and I haven't
experienced any outage when there's a power outage, but we also haven't
had any extended outage.  Since the fiber network is run by the utility,
the huts are at substations, so it would take a substation outage to
knock out power to the hut (and I think they may still also have
generators at the huts).

-- 
Chris Adams <cma at cmadams.net>