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There were a few research papers done after the 2015 Lancaster “Storm Desmond”
floods and the upshot for comms wasn’t great – an hour or so runtime on mobile
and broadband cabinets seems fair based on that experience. Direct exchange
lines as mentioned, are (were) generator backed.
It was strange to see people queueing to use pay-phones for the first time in
years, as the only form of communication and students more worried about trying
to get some Internet access to find out what’s going on, rather than the
immediate availability of food/water.
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/engineering/about/news-archive/2016/learning-from-lancasters-power-cuts/
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https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-university/content-assets/documents/engineering/RAEngLivingwithoutelectricity.pdf
^ see the “what we can learn” as well as the ‘comms’ section.
One thing that experience did impress on me, is that generators inevitably
quickly become a hotly-contested commodity in a wide-scale outage – if you rely
on using someone else’s, you may not be as far up the priority tree as you
thought when the day comes.
Cheers,
Robin
From: uknof <uknof-boun...@lists.uknof.org.uk> On Behalf Of Darren Wright
Sent: 04 February 2023 21:15
To: Rob Pickering <r...@pickering.org>
Cc: uknof@lists.uknof.org.uk; Stephen Wilcox <steve.wil...@ixreach.com>; Israel
G. Lugo <israel.l...@lugosys.com>; Leo Vegoda <l...@vegoda.org>; Brandon
Butterworth <bran...@bogons.net>
Subject: Re: [uknof] Typical last mile battery runtime (protecting against
power cuts)
Hi all.
My understanding is FTTC cabinets “should” last 4-6 hours as the front doors
have batteries in, however speaking to a lot of Openreach engineers over the
years the batteries are mostly poorly maintained, I have seen them only last
mins before during a power cut.
We have 3x master exchanges in Northumberland and all have generator backups,
one of which kicks in regularly. We have ups’s in exchanges but they are only
needed for upto 1 min before the generators kick in.
Hope this helps.
Kind Regards,
Darren Wright
Co-Founder & Director
Zone Broadband
On 4 Feb 2023, at 9:01 pm, Rob Pickering
<r...@pickering.org<mailto:r...@pickering.org>> wrote:
One of my home circuits (rural area) comes out of an OpenReach FTTC AIO cabinet
very close by and next to the same DNO transformer that feeds us.
Our DNO infrastructure is truly appalling and we have regular 4-12 hour utility
power outages when one of the many antique transformers on our 11KV ring makes
like a firework, and occasional multi-day outages when cables they have thrown
in a culvert break down or trees fall on multiple overhead sections during
storms.
The AIO cabinet definitely has either UPS backup power, or is DC powered from
the main exchange. I suspect it is the former as we lose the DSL lines only
after 8+ hours, but we do lose them.
We also lose mobile coverage after about 18 hours and it becomes more patchy in
the general area so some of the mobile base stations are battery only.
On Sat, 4 Feb 2023 at 18:41, Stephen Wilcox
<steve.wil...@ixreach.com<mailto:steve.wil...@ixreach.com>> wrote:
I can give an anecdotal reply, since I've never ran those types of facilities
myself..
My understanding is that in general the main exchanges (the ones in cities,
formerly tandem exchanges and /possibly/ the equivalent by cable) would have
generator backup as they are run as high availability data centres, meaning
they drop to battery for a minute then generators kick in for as long as they
are fed fuel... in theory indefinitely unless there is severe emergency in the
area.
In the more rural locations I've not heard of generators being used and think
they are UPS driven, so from minutes upwards but not stretching into hours.
I would assume street cabinets either have no backup power or some basic
batteries at best - at least the ones I've seen inside don't appear to have
anything of note aside the telco gear.
Someone with first hand knowledge would be better placed to answer, but in the
absence of that, the above is my experience from, well, quite some time ago but
I don't see why it would have changed..
HTH
Steve
On Sat, 4 Feb 2023 at 15:44, Brandon Butterworth
<bran...@bogons.net<mailto:bran...@bogons.net>> wrote:
On Fri Feb 03, 2023 at 03:16:28PM -0800, Leo Vegoda wrote:
> > Question is, how much battery runtime can I typically expect from ISPs'
> > last mile infra. I was hoping some of you here might help estimate from
> > own experience.
>
> Ofcom ran a consultation on this in 2011. They suggested a minimum of
> one hour battery backup. My reading is that that is what they went
> with but the Ofcom site doesn't make that sparklingly clear, so I
> could be wrong. I'm also not sure if whatever obligation they came up
> with in 2011 has been updated.
Survey says 1 hour? It is academic what people think when there is an
actual plan for <checks notes> rolling 3 hour outages several times per day
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electricity-supply-emergency-code
So not only do you need to plan for the down time you need to consider the
recovery time of your system. Lead based systems will take many times
the run time to recharge and may not be ready for the next outage. Thus
LiFePo4 batteries are the way to go, we can recharge at more than our
discharge rate.
Without rolling blackouts we have already had this problem with normal rural
supply. We had many multi hour outages and concluded we need 6 to 8 hours
capacity if we wish to operate through them. That also allows time to find
the nature of the fault, the likely resolution time and for someone to take
a generator to site (perhaps multiple sites) if needed.
Due to the reach of fibre and FWA it is normal for our power to go down
while some customers are on a feed that is up, so it is not pointless
keeping our sites running.
We sent this note to our customers
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zvleyj0epqzne5y/20221103_winter_power.pdf?dl=0
so they can choose based on their needs rather than part fixing the
problem for them, having just internet may not be sufficient for many.
It is a bit late to be worrying about rolling blackouts this winter as the
threat has reduced and by the time a solution is deployed at scale it will
be spring or summer.
brandon
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Stephen Wilcox
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