Having worked for a cable company some years ago, I know what we had on our plant. Other operators may not be as good, also there is always the potential that an event like a hurricane or a vehicle crashing into a pole could no only take out power, but damage the cable lines themselves. Nothing is ever 100%.
Yep, backup systems are evolving, as is remote monitoring. When I worked at a cable company the only way we knew about an outage was from customer reports (or police / fire for accident caused outages). Around the time I left they were doing a rebuild / upgrade which among other improvements brought remote monitoring of all the line gear. It still wouldn't tell you if a tree took out an individual customer's drop, but any line gear failures or damage would give alarms. Of course if you're in tornado alley, your service will still be out a good while if a tornado rips up half a mile of poles.
(snip)
Chuckle. I bet they have lost several generators, however. Bolt cutters are cheap.
Unless they have buried service in your area, most cable outages are due to tree limbs and/or ice taking lines down.
This is what rabbit ears are for, folks. Cable TV is nice-to-have, not a survival neccessity. If you get your phone via the cable TV, well, you shoulda read the fine print. The tradeoff for lower cost is lower reliability. If I had cable, and went with cable phone, I'd at least have a prepaid semi-disposable cell as a backup.
Were you the poster with all the UPS boxes and the generator? Just how were you verifying cable stayed on during the power outage? aem sends...
Yours is a legitimate issue. I suppose it is no different than subscribing to the services of a single electric power utility - upon which virtually all of us rely. Subscribing to TWO such feeds, even if a second were available, would be cost prohibitive.
Coaxial cable-based telephone networks employ a vastly different and, in some ways, improved technology whereby everything is delivered via one coaxial cable. There is an "RT" (voice port) on the outside of most subscribers' premises. It is there that the digital signal is converted to analog to interface with your legacy telephone equipment. The current required to power these individual terminals is delivered over the same coax from the neighborhood's interface/node/whatever. It is this power (and the conversion at the back of the house) that creates the dialtone heard when going off-hook and the ringing current when a call is received. If you listen carefully at this RT on the back of the house when receiving a call, you'll hear a small relay clicking on-and-off, interrupting the ringing current.
This is not necessarily a given. If the CATV-based system has prompt standby power, your dialtone could easily remain virtually uninterrupted or restore much more promptly than the failed grid, which would empower "corded" phones while cordless sets/systems would remain silent without their required grid power.
Agreed. However, a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) phone, AKA a "corded" phone, is a valuable tool to use at the interface for trouble shooting. Regardless of who or what is providing your telephone service, a corded phone might work when the lights go out. Keeping a CheapieChirper phone in a drawer is cheap insurance.
I believe that neither a subscriber-provided UPS or genset can be used to restore power to a cable-based phone system as it is the current applied to the neighborhood's coaxial network that powers the voice port mounted on each subscribers' home.
Nevertheless, yours is a classic example of our decreasing tolerance for service outages and our improving lifestyle that places such things as a standby generator within reach of more and more mere mortals.
In the case of a home-based VOIP system (Voice Over Internet Protocol) during a grid power failure, a UPS then generator could power the system in the home. Of course, the VOIP system relies on working input from the broadband provider. If the neighborhood system, which provides the needed data flow to a VOIP system, is down, the VOIP user has no "dial tone".
Bingo.
my experience is different. During Hurricane Floyd in Sept. 1999,
I guess your voice service is provided via copper pair.
When we had a major grass fire a year and a half ago, it damaged some of the cable from the heat and dropped about 5 poles. The cable and power went out about 4:00 PM. The electric company had the poles and the electricity back up about 9:00 PM. Cox, the cable company, had service restored about 9:30 PM. We did have an outage the next day for a couple of hours when they were replacing additional cable and electronics that could have been damaged from the heat. Those cable line guys were moving right behind the electric company people stringing new cable. I was really surprised just how quickly both companies were able to respond.
There it is: Protacted land line/voice outages should be increasingly rare.
The next time an outage occurs, poll your neighbors and ask the NAME of their voice provider. I predict that those WITHOUT service are with the SAME provider while those WITH service use the services from another provider/network.
I have found my phone to be a lot more reliable since I moved it to cable. See my other post about the grass fire. All my cable services were back up in about 5 1/2 hours. The phone company was still trying to get people back up 4 days later and their lines were underground not overhead.
As long as the utility can demonstrate a reasonable level of ongoing maintenance to their infrastructure and timely response to trouble reports, they are probably not penalized for the occasional grid failure over which they have no control. Regardless, this is a service industry just like all the others: The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Given what we pay for such services, the consumer should not tolerate poor service. It's pretty surprising those that do, however.
Real example: Prior to replacing the grandfathered protector assembly with a new SNI, and upon initial inspection discovering that there were APPARENTLY two working services (main & fax/computer line), I asked the customer if she had TWO lines. Her reply: Yes, but they have never been able to USE the second line!
Somewhat surprised, I asked how long they had had the service. About six months, she said. "Did you ever report the trouble?" I queried. "I've never gotten around to it" was her reply.
It was all I could do to restrain my sarcasm with my follow-up: "Oh, THANK-YOU, ma'am! I wish EVERYONE would pay for out service but not insist on using it. It would make my job MUCH easier!"
Of that you can be sure. The only public service industry older than telephony is the railroad. They "invented" lawyers. They have their sh*t together in the regulatory arena like no other.
If your service is working, albeit submerged at times and laying on the ground at other times, they do not view the issue as out-of-service. If your service, despite the crappy conditions you list, is working particularly well, your issue is not even statused as "service affecting". Translation: Don't hold your breath. That THEIR property is flapping in the breeze or submerged is THEIR problem, not yours, as long as you're getting what you're paying for.
Wotta business model.
If your current service is good, or even just adequate, switching providers would be for SAVINGS alone. Even then, after the switch-over inticements are used up (1/2-price for 6 months, etc), the price is rarely much different. Lately, the incumbent telco is occasionally CHEAPER than the "new" dialtone company. Ain't competition grand?
Bingo.
I was dispatched to a rural home whose aerial "drop" ran through a grove/thicket of scrub trees. The drop was stretched so tight that the insulation had pulled away from the "p-clamp", exposing - and SHORTING - the pair.
Knowing I would replace the drop anyway, I simply reached up and clipped the taut drop. It snapped briskly back toward the thicket. A minute later there was a loud crash back there. A ~30-foot, dead tree had been laying against the old drop and, when the wire was cut, the tree fell.
BTW, no one was back there but it still made noise!
on 8/26/2007 11:29 PM Jim Redelfs said the following:
A few months ago, when I was tired of paying exorbitant prices for my telco phone service and thinking about VoIP, I decided to give the telco one last chance. I called them and asked (rather facetiously) the service rep who answered, "I'm paying too much for telephone service, should I go with Vonage or Time Warner"? She dropped the monthly charges by about a third and I didn't lose any of the extras I had been paying for before.
A grass fire is probably one of the easier things to respond to since unlike a tornado or hurricane it doesn't really leave a ton of debris in the way that need to be cleared first.
I have backup for my backup for my backup :). I also work from home full time and rely on my Internet connectivity, so when (most of) the lights go out I am still online and working. I also have two land lines (underground in this area) and dialup provides marginal backup for the cable.
I haven't run across a cable company that doesn't have backup power. I'm sure there is some crappy system without backup somewhere, but all I have dealt with had reasonable backup. Now that they are in the voice and data markets as well as video they are also taking backup even more seriously.
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