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0 pointsssl-32y ago0 comments

> Curious, why not advocate for the power company to provide battery backup at the substations? Why should the only part of our infrastructure that's battery backed be the phone system?

There is a difference of several orders of magnitude between a backup power system that is able to keep a telco central office online (one singular building) and a backup power system that is able to keep an entire substation's connected subscribers online (thousands of buildings).

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ianburrell2y ago· 1 in thread

Landline phones provide power to customer phones, and would need to include the power for thousands of buildings in that.

Also, no one is requiring ISPs to power customer equipment. In most cases, that is impossible to do with fiber. But the provided equipment could include a battery backup. It is now possible to make small LiFePO4 battery that could survive for hours. It is acceptable to make backup power the customer's responsibility.

The important thing is that network equipment keeps working. Which in my experience it does.

ssl-3OP2y ago

There's still several orders of magnitude of difference between powering thousands of landline phones (which, by design, use very close to zero energy while on-hook), and powering thousands of homes and businesses.

No amount of handwaving or goalpost moving is going to ever change that. It is simply fact.

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