larry wrote:
Uncle Monster wrote:

Correction, the main backup at phone company central offices
is banks of batteries. There are generators but the battery
banks can keep the phone service up for days. If anyone wants
to know about storage batteries, the phone companies have a
great deal of knowledge and experience. The battery rooms at
at phone company central offices would astound you.

Update! The large Central Office battery rooms are shrinking fast:
Solid state equipment is more power efficient.
CO's are now unmanned.
CO only has 12-24 hr battery.
CO has no generator.
Lead and sulfuric acid are banned or hazmat.

It's much more cost effective to pull up a portable 50KW Onan at the CO
building and "plug" into the charger buss. One portable can easily
support a dozen COs during long, wide area power outages and "parked"
where needed.

The cell sites work the same way.


Its just a cost cutting measure. A lot of people don't realize how
Mickey Mouse some carriers infrastructure really is. The traditional
old school carriers such as Verizon still have lots of battery and also
installed generators.

Same is true of the cell carriers. Verizon Wireless has battery and
almost always an installed generator at each cell site. Other operators
typically have only minimal battery and a power connector.

A trailer mounted generator might be a good idea for a really local
outage but having one installed on each site is just a little nicer. Ask
anyone who was in the hurricanes in Florida about wireless carriers and
they will tell you only one of them was up during the storms and for the
weeks after when there was no commercial power.

I know someone who works for a particular wireless carrier and he tells
me they have exactly two trailer mounted generators to cover 2 1/2 states.





The phone companies are quietly doing away with the massive lead
liability they had. Find a piece of lead jacketed phone cable these
days, and figure the tons of lead leached from aerial cable.

Your copper phone line is now powered from a local neighborhood fiber
fed "hut" or RemoteTerminal and a few automotive sized batteries. It's
not a big city thing either, rural Adams County Pa now has many more RTs
than COs!

All this new fiber stuff is moving the RT and terrabits to your back
door ;-)

-larry / dallas