Typical last mile battery runtime (protecting against power cuts)

Mark Tinka mark at tinka.africa
Sat Feb 4 21:49:30 UTC 2023



On 2/4/23 23:36, Sabri Berisha wrote:

> Those must be different from ours, because we don't have that...

Even before we had power issues in South Africa, garage and gate motors 
had batteries in them. So it appears to be historical, for some reason 
or other.


> Pretty impressive. How do they do that in SA?

Providing backup power is not an issue in major data centres.

GPON providers also do rather well in keeping the lights on during an 
outage. When outages were still relatively limited 5 or so years ago, 
you couldn't keep your home link up for more than an hour during an 
outage. Now with outages being more sustained, neither I nor a 
reasonable sample of folk I know have had their GPON fibre out during an 
outage, even when they occur multiple times in the day. I suspect decent 
use of batteries and generators.

Wireless ISP's seem to be doing just fine too, as they, obviously, have 
limited scale. Again, batteries and generators.

The mobile carriers suffer the most, as do operators who deploy Metro 
PoP's in commercial buildings that aren't consistent with backup power 
promises. The mobile operators are having to deal with battery theft and 
incomplete battery recharges between multiple outages in a single day.

Mark.


More information about the NANOG mailing list