TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Phone Repairs Continue in Flooded New Hampshire

Re: Phone Repairs Continue in Flooded New Hampshire

Bruce L. Bergman (blnospambergman@notchur.biz)
Wed, 25 Apr 2007 06:26:00 GMT

PAT - Please leave my address munged or off.

On Tue, 24 Apr 2007 04:31:15 UTC, Steven J. Sobol wrote:

> In article <telecom26.108.11@telecom-digest.org>, Paul wrote:

>> And meanwhile, Verizon shamelessly continues its "It's ON!" advertising
>> about their landline service, which was not even true BEFORE the
>> flooding!

>> Airing those ads NOW is especially insulting to the victims of the
>> current outage.

> It's irrelevant to many people, anyhow. My new Charter Cable
> phone-over-fiber service goes out if the power goes out. My Verizon
> traditional phone-over-copper line had battery backup at the CO, but it
> didn't matter to us anyhow, since our only landline handset is cordless!

Two things: One, you can't scrape up an old-fashioned 2500 set for
no-batteries-required phone use in a power outage? They do make
cordless phones that will run on batteries, that's one reason why I
bought my old Uniden exs9800 - the base station and answering machine
section have a second NiCad battery for backup.

And two, the "It's ON!" campaign is irrelevant when the switchroom
goes totally out of service due to an Act of God - that could happen
to the CATV headend or switch just as easily as to the ILEC switch.

Switches do suffer catastrophic failures. I got an up close look at
Sylmar CA, where they got a brutal real-world lesson in earthquake
bracing ... The original home of Cable Grid, where they rolled out 4"
x 4" x 1/8" Concrete Reinforcement welded wire over the top steel to
save a bunch of time putting up cable rack when putting the switchroom
back together.

The basic premise behind the advertising campaign is sound. Even
though they can never be perfect the ILEC's generally take far more
complete utility power failure precautions than the CATV Companies.

For the ILEC POTS having 99.99+% overall reliability is Mission
Critical, since they are serving many users who require that uptime.
Alarm systems, police, hospitals, fire department, people with medical
problems, etc. But for the CATV people it's an afterthought.

--<< Bruce >>--

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