FCC Requires Backup Power For 210K Cell Towers

1sockchuck alerts us to an article in Data Center Knowledge that explores ramifications from the FCC's decision a couple of months back to require backup power for cell sites and other parts of the telecom infrastructure. The new rule was prompted by wireless outages during Hurricane Katrina. There are more than 210,000 cell towers in the US, as well as 20,000 telecom central offices that will also need generators or batteries. Municipalities are bracing for disputes as carriers try to add generators or batteries to cell sites on rooftops or water towers. The rules will further boost demand in the market for generators, where there are already lengthy delivery backlogs for some models.

Comments

You mean they didn't before?

[dgatwood]

Yikes!

Re:You mean they didn't before?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cellphones weren't considered vital infrastructure before. And even now it is hard to argue that they can be since you can't always guarantee a usable signal in all locations (which makes it less useful to emergency responders) and since cellphone networks can easily be overwhelmed in emergencies where everybody gets on the phone at once, like during the 9/11 attacks.

At the same time, when cellphones are usable, they can be very helpful. If many of the cell towers didn't fail during Katrina, it would have been much easier to help many of the victims and coordinate the rescue in a more efficient manner.

That's alright, I know a guy

[Smordnys s'regrepsA]

I know a guy, he can get you all the batteries you want, alike the brade of your choice, at 1/5 the price!

At last

[weorthe]

Millions of people will be able to call each other to ask "is your power out too?"

Re:At last

[Kent Recal]

I usually just say "Yes, and the phone system is down, too. We're working on it, can you get back to me later?".
Usually they just say ok and hang up, without even noticing...

Re:At last

[jamesh]

Not quite as silly as you might think. In rural locations, it is quite possible that the power failure is very local (eg a possum climbed up the pole the night before and cooked a fuse (and itself)), and the power company won't know about it unless you tell them. Phoning up a neighbor is a reasonable thing to do in that case.

This used to happen all the time at my mums place. The outage would affect her and the weekend house across the road (who would most likely be away). The neighbor up the hill would be a good indicator to it being a possum induced fuse failure or something more widespread.

Ditto for a failure in your fusebox. If everyone else has power and you don't, there isn't much use calling the power company... I know most people reading this would have a tripped breaker fixed in a few seconds, but maybe your grandmother wouldn't know how to, and in fact she might still have fuse wire instead of a resettable breaker.

Even for the mail server case, a user in a remote branch who hasn't received any email all morning would probably ask if the server was down before bothering you with their specific issue. Of course a good helpdesk would put up a recorded message in that case eg 'We are currently experiencing problems with our email server, we expect the problem to be fixed in xxx minutes'.

Solar

[proudfoot]

Maybe self powering solar paneled towers might be better. You'd be helping the environment as well as providing backup. And the height of these towers are perfect for a wind turbine + battery installation as well.
Even if it's not perfectly reliable, such a tower could be connected to the grid, and in the event of emergency, it'll be at the very least, intermittent,which is enough for some traffic to flow out for a very long time. With a battery/generator, you'd only have power, while reliable, for a limited amount of time.

Disaster response?

[brownsteve]

I am a ham radio operator and concern myself with disaster preparedness. With POTS (plain old telephone system) everyone is guaranteed their own connection, complete with line backup power so you can use the phone even if the power's out. Sometimes the switches overload and "all circuits are busy" but in most situations it's worked pretty well for the last century.

I worry about the trend to move to cell phones. We rely on both our cell phone's battery and the cell tower to stay powered. We also rely on available frequencies to use the tower. In Katrina and recently the San Diego fires, everyone immediately got on their cell phones and jammed all of the towers. Is there enough redundancy, power, and capacity to handle the next disaster? I don't think we should wait for the next hurricane to prove if cell towers can handle an emergency.

I am in a Outage RIGHT NOW with NO Cell Service!

[Zymergy]

I am currently in a power outage with NO Cellular Service (of any type)! This actually *sucks* and is inexcusable (considering what I pay!)
Those Damn Ice Storms here in the Central US (today and yesterday). (Generators/UPS are so so nice!)
Had Cell Service (with AT&T/Cingular) for about 3 hours following the outage (currently the largest single outage in my state's history)... but apparently the cell-site UPS batteries drained and the tower site did not have a generator...
I am going to ask for a prorated refund for my service plan (and they will legally HAVE TO give me that discount for my contracted service being out).
If EVERYONE called up their service providers and asked specifically for their prorated discount for service being out (on that given day)... I bet they would invest in UPS/Generator combos at the cell tower sites... -Z

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Solar and Wind Turbine

[Tisha_AH]

To provide solar power to a cell site would require several hundred square feet of space to mount the panels. Sizing a solar power system for infrastructure requires planning for when the amount of sun is at the minimum (approx 2 hours during wintertime at northern latitudes). A aolar system must put a full charge on the battery system to account for charging losses, battery inefficiency, and the continual demand of the load. To match up to a solar power system you need a very significant battery string (when I do system calculations I assume that the system can go for three days without sun). Mounting a wind turbine on a cell tower is problematic too. An antenna structure has a loading (ANSI 222 (f or g)) that has to account for ice, maximum wind and the surface area of the tower, feedline, antennas, etc... A wind turbine adds ALOT of loading to a structure. I suspect that 90% of the cell towers out there right now could not pass the structural analysis under ANSI.

Re:Still have a problem

[techno-vampire]

That's ridiculous, and I'm surprised you posted it.

You must be new here.

Katrina

[tsotha]

Regarding hurricane Katrina:

I work for a large cell carrier. We had backup power to every single cell in the area. In fact, after the hurricane we were doing pretty well, though some of the towers were taken out by debris. Only a couple were actually submerged. We lost a few trunk lines, but for the most part the system was working.

The problem was we didn't have any way to get gas to the generators. The roads were impassible, and based on news reports we were reluctant to send crews in to the sites we could reach for security reasons. So after a couple days the cell sites started going offline one at a time as the generators ran out of power.

As far as I know every one of our sites, in the entire country, already has a couple days worth of backup power.