Re: [PLUG] Re: Verizon FIOS..Any thoughts?

[Kevin Brosius <kbrosius@kns.com>]

Doug 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 continure 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. 

There has been quite a lot of discussion about this over on
broadbandreports.com in the Verizon fiber optics forum.  A couple more
knowledgeable people point out that the local CO power is battery backed
up also.  The consensus seems to be that you'll get battery backed power
from the CO, plus whatever time they have fuel to run the generators on
a standard copper line.  After that, they will truck in fuel for the
generators if the CO is road accessible.  (In case you wondered about
more serious outages.)

For fiber, I believe Verizon's is passive to the premises, so only CO
power and your battery power determine how long it's up.  A friend just
got it installed, and he said the Verizon tech told him 8 hours of talk
time on the battery (plus some 15 minutes of internet so you have time
to shutdown - first time I heard that.)  The tech also claimed that you
use up 15 minutes of battery time for each phone call, I'm guessing for
ringer usage on incoming calls.  So shorter calls sound like they use up
the battery in quicker chunks.

-- 
Kevin Brosius
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