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Grading Telco & ISPs During the Blackout of 2003?

Posted by Cliff on from the dialtones-in-the-dark dept.

alt_cognito asks: "Our company runs natural gas generators here in Novi MI and when the power went out we didn't miss a beat. Nine hours later, our telco blinked and our T1 service went down despite the lines being run to different locations and ISPs (UUNet, LDMI). Service did not return until power had returned to the upstream offices. I was under the impression that these locations would be run by similar power generation. How did your telco/ISP perform?"

1 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Bet your local telco is the problem. by Myself · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'd bet otherwise. The local telco's CO has 18+ hours of battery and a week of diesel/kerosene, and they test-run their turbine every 6 months to make sure it can carry the load. CO's just don't go down, the uptime of switches is measured in decades, and most offices have never had a power hit on the equipment side.

    It's possible that your line doesn't come straight from the CO, rather it hops through a remote equipment location (a "hut" or "vault"), which has batteries but no generator.

    Huts, vaults, and cellular base stations aren't considered big enough to deserve their own generators, but they have big sockets outside, where a trailer-mounted generator can be plugged in. Unfortunately, nobody plans for all however-many-thousand sites to be off the grid at the same time, and there are usually only 2 or 3 techs with trucks towing generators around for any given region.

    It's also possible that your circuits aren't carried on copper at all. If you have more than 4 T-1's, it's more economical to bring them in on a fiber loop than maintaining a bunch of T-1 spans. An OC-3 ring can carry 3 DS3 (T-3) circuits, or 84 DS1 (T-1) circuits. Therefore, such a ring will usually leave the CO and wander through town, with "nodes" in many different customers' buildings before returning to the CO. Each node on customer premises lives in a big blue cabinet, with batteries at the bottom which will sustain it for a few hours. SONET ring architecture is such that a single failure doesn't kill traffic, but if nodes on either side of you fail, you're isolated.

    Without knowing more about your situation, this is all I can say, but I'm very certain that the C.O. never lost battery.