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[PLUG] Re: Verizon FIOS..Any thoughts?
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On Mon, 24 Jul 2006, Doug Crompton wrote:
Just a note about FIOS - understand that this is battery backed up at the
user site with a battery that is spec'ed I believe for 8 hours. The wave
of severe storms we had last week proved that as my neighbor, who has
FIOS, lost her phone service after about that amount of time. The power
was off a total of 36 hours. I opt'ed to keep my (copper) DSL here
and although I did not have power to run my computer a dedicated phone
continued to work. While an outage of more then 8 hours is unusual in a
'real' emergency where the power outage is widespread and long the only
thing that will continue to work is the good old copper lines, battery
and backup powered from the CO.
I also don't know what the power requirements are for the large FIOS boxes
they put on the poles. I assume there are batteries in there also??? The
bottom line is you cannot depend on it in a power failure. It is probably
a level better then cable which usually always goes out in a power
failure but not as good a good old copper.
Are those boxes more than junction/splitter boxes? It would be interesting
to know what is actually in them. If for instance the devices in them are
strictly passive then the power limitations are based on how long you can
keep your end up for.
It is very unlikely the CO will loose power and if it did the copper lines
will be down anyway. :-( If OTOH, they contain active components then they
have the same problems as HFC, although I suspect the power supplies for
FIOS would be sized better than the HFC systems Comcast has out there.
FWIW, I have looked at the outside of the FIOS boxes and I cannot see any
external power being supplied to them, only fiber in and out.
Comcast is at a real disadvantage wrt this, because a lot of the power
supplies hanging on the poles were installed in a time before 2 way
communications on cable was possible. Even once they started doing 2 way cable
modems they continued to stretch those power supplies out to their max
capacity.
Unless they have changed their policies in the last few years and spent
a bunch of money to add more backup power to their system, this is a real
drawback to having your phone on cable.
I know that during the recent storms my neighbors cable was out for a couple
of days while my DSL was back on after power was restored to the router.
We were fortunate in that the power was only out here for about 8 hours.
Regards,
Tom
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