FTTP installation

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yes. totally agree

[Theo]

12V. None of the OR ones (Huawei, Nokia) seem to support PoE, sadly.

That's not a bad idea. I'm sure you can get better splitters. A PoE UPS might be useful in terms of keeping router, switches and IP phones alive.

I hope routers will get better at power management - for example, detect that the power has gone out and fall back to a less power intensive mode of operation to make the battery last longer, perhaps by dropping rates on wifi or ethernet and throttling CPU.

Theo

[Andy Burns]

Note that chrome 84 and firefox 78 both disabled TLS1.0 and TLS1.1 last month, so unless servers support newer encryption, you'll get that message.

[The Natural Philosopher]

that is an OLD server

I am not sure I can be bothered to upgrade it. I may simply move the album to the newer one and leave that as mail only.

[Scott]

Have you not stripped all Huawei kit out yet :-)

[John Rumm]

What is in the external box?

Does not help much when your router and wifi is not powered...

Indeed, PON terminal is not a router, just a PPPoE modem - you need a router etc in addition to it, and if you have the battery backup for the PON box it does not power the router, so you are back to a separate UPS.

[charles]

I have a small UPS which supplies my FTTC router and modem which gives me wifi.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa)]

Here waterfox simply says insecure connection.

Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa)]

Virgin have let me keep copper on the landline as I'm considered vulnerable due to being blind and living on my own. Brian

[John Rumm]

Well same here - but I suspect we are in a tiny minority. Also having a USP you can power the PON terminal as well - so it does not need its own battery. However for those without a UPS the PON terminal running on its own is pointless, so ergo, it does not need its own battery.

[Sn!pe]

May I please have recommendations for a domestic UPS to provide backup power to a FTTC modem, a router/WiFi AP and a small Synology NAS for two hours or more? In this case quality and reliabilty are more important than cost.

I already have a basic line-powered landline phone so there's no need to provide for that. Also, my mobile phone can provide limited WiFi hotspot data service, so I'd like to be able to charge phones and iPads too.

TIA

[Chris Green]

Why keep the NAS going? There's nothing with power to use it is there?

[Andy Burns]

I use a big old APC smartups, it was free (plus I have a couple of spares) it eats a set of batteries every 5 years, and it adds a few quid to the leccy bill due to losses, but I wouldn't want to be without it. That probably doesn't amount to a recommendation that it's what everyone else should have though ...

laptops?

[Sn!pe]

[...]

That's true enough, but I'm old fashioned enough to fret about an ungraceful shutdown if mains power goes off. Perhaps I'm worrying needlessly, but running it on a UPS would mean it could be shut down gracefully. Thanks for the response, Chris.

[No Name]

My choice of UPS make would be APC.

You do need to size the UPS correctly so what you do is add up all the total wattage of all the loads and then work out how many watt-hours need by multiplying by the desired run time.

Then you add correction factors such as the UPS conversion efficiency and power factor plus a margin to allow for eventual battery degradation so you don't end up replacing the batteries sooner than expected if the run time falls below your two hours. Budget for replacing the batteries every 3 to 5 years.

You could consider also purchasing a PoE network switch as you can get Poe To USB chargers for your ipads and iphones: see here for an example:

Most UPSes start beeping during a power cut. The whole point of a UPS is to allow you to shut down your attached IT gear without having catastrophic data loss. So a UPS typically gives you a grace time of say

5 to 15 minutes before it shuts down as if you discharge the batteries too far, the battery lifetime is shortened.

If you are running your UPS for that length of time, The UPS's inverter and batteries will be getting warmer than would be typical which will certainly affect the lifetime and reliability of the UPS.

So you will need to check the Specs that the UPS you want really can run for that long reliably.

Will the beeping of up to 2 hours drive you up the wall? :-)

Also many UPSes allow a direct conenction to either a USB equipped computer or sometimes an ethernet connection. The UPS driver software on the PC or server then has the ability to monitor the UPS and can gracefully shut itself down within minutes of a power cut starting before the UPS runs out of power. You can usually set a shutdown threshold of when the batteries reach a X% of total battery capacity.

If this is not feasible at the location of teh UPS, you can use a raspberry Pi with some UPS software on it and then you can SSH or Putty or remote desktop into the Pi to check up on teh UPS state and reporting logs.

Given that much of your hardware is on wall warts I wonder if a simple car battery and a trickle car battery charger with some LM317Ts or even some cigar lighter socket to Laptop PSUs set to the various voltages required might be a more cost effective and electrically simpler and more reliable option as then you do not have the conversion losses and all the extra circuitry due to:

230 V AC mains to DC battery charging within the UPS DC to AC inverter within the UPS Then 220V AC to DC conversion via the various wall warts to the IT kit

vs

Car battery trickle charger from 220 V AC to 12V DC

Then a bank of LM317Ts set to the required DC voltages to the router, ONT, Wifi AP thereby bypassing the wall warts entirely

This is one conversion efficiency loss only vs 3 sets of conversion efficiency losses.

You can get Car Cigar socket USB based chargers which would then also power your iPads and iPhones.

Another option to look at is a Honda Generator running on LPG gas bottles or on Natural gas.

You can even wire two Honda generators in parallel via a kit and have an automatic start device in case of a power loss. An ordinary UPS can then cover the transition betwene grid power and locally generated power.

In my experience, a natural gas supply or a Propane tank seems more reliable than a nation grid supply.....

HTH,

S.

[No Name]

Comiing back to the idea of using car batteries, if a Caravan leisure battery is used, they can tolerate deeper discharges as the plates are thicker and buckle less ths avoiding the cell(s) shorting out. They are however heavier and bigger and more costly!

It *might* be possible to swap the UPS batteries for a leisure battery if battery lifetime/reliability/extended run time is important.

[Andy Burns]

Only if you don't press the "silence" button ...

[No Name]

I've owned loads of UPSes over the years and I've never seen a silence button!.

S.

[Bob Eager]

I have three APC units here and all they have is on/off.

[Andy Burns]

And what does pressing the "on" button do during a power-cut?