Do broadband cabinets keep going during power cuts?

[Clive Page]

It seems there's at least a small chance of rotating power cuts this winter, if there's not enough gas for electricity generation. I'd like to keep our broadband going in the event of power cuts, so am thinking of getting a battery+inverter as backup.

Our own router can't use more than a few watts, so would be easy to power for 3 hours from a small battery, but we now have a FTTC connection, and there seems to be quite a bit of mains-powered gubbins in the street-corner cabinets. Does anyone know what happens to them if there's a power cut covering the whole district? No point in getting battery power for the router if the line is down.

--
Clive Page

[grinch]

The one I used to be connected to did, I have seen them. How long they
would last and if they would work at all is another matter.

Have they been maintained recently ? Also there are lots of other bits
of kit between you and the internet that may not have working batteries.

For a home user just wait until the power comes back on. If you want a
guaranteed service speak to your provider but expect to pay a lot more
than you are at the moment

I would backup your router config as things have a nasty habit of not
working properly or at all after power outages. Particularly old things.

[Bob Eager]

I have three UPS units, so I can keep going (with the basic stuff) for a
couple of hours.

I wouldn't trust the cabinets to stay up long, although the OpenReach
ones would be superior to (say) Virgin.

I have two fallbacks. I have a 4G fallback dongle plugged into the
router. That isn't very cheap but it works. For simple browsing, I use a
tablet via a hotspot on my phone. I get about 12GB/month which is ample.

[Andrew Gabriel]

I'm not on Virgin, but around me, Virgin internet apparently goes off
instantly the mains supply fails, and also for some remote mains
failures when yours isn't impacted.

I'm still on openreach ADSL2+, which I suspect is the most likely to
still work during a power cut, as it needs no power between you and the
exchange, as far as I know.

Andrew

[Bob Eager]

On Sun, 09 Oct 2022 13:24:27 +0100, Andrew Gabriel wrote:

> I'm not on Virgin, but around me, Virgin internet apparently goes off
> instantly the mains supply fails, and also for some remote mains
> failures when yours isn't impacted.
>
> I'm still on openreach ADSL2+, which I suspect is the most likely to
> still work during a power cut, as it needs no power between you and the
> exchange, as far as I know.

I'm on FTTP. I have no idea for far that goes before it needs a repeater.

[notya...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, 9 October 2022 at 13:24:29 UTC+1, Andrew Gabriel wrote:
> On 09/10/2022 12:06, Bob Eager wrote:
> > On Sun, 09 Oct 2022 10:46:50 +0100, Clive Page wrote:
> >

SNIP

> >
> > I wouldn't trust the cabinets to stay up long, although the OpenReach
> > ones would be superior to (say) Virgin.

BT telephone exchanges have battery back up and some have generators.

> >
> > I have two fallbacks. I have a 4G fallback dongle plugged into the
> > router. That isn't very cheap but it works. For simple browsing, I use a
> > tablet via a hotspot on my phone. I get about 12GB/month which is ample.
> I'm not on Virgin, but around me, Virgin internet apparently goes off
> instantly the mains supply fails, and also for some remote mains
> failures when yours isn't impacted.
>
> I'm still on openreach ADSL2+, which I suspect is the most likely to
> still work during a power cut, as it needs no power between you and the
> exchange, as far as I know.

AFAIK Openreach broadband cabinets receive data by fibre and have mains power. I doubt they have UPS, so would probably go off. PSTN cabinets have no mains and pass through -48V DC exchange power to phones etc. The broadband was put in new cabinets because the leaky old ones would be an H&S risk.

As for VM cabinets they did not even come out to replace the doors after three separate reports.

We had a brief wide area cut last November (first in at least 46 years) and with no back up everything mains powered in my home went down. I was on my mobile sat in front of my lap top at the time, and my call carried on, so I assumed our RCD had tripped, but soon realised otherwise when our alarm went off (non RCD way with failed battery), my partner started complaining and I took a quick look out of the window.

AIUI larger base stations do incorporate some ability to withstand power cuts.

>
> Andrew

[grinch]

On 09/10/2022 12:06, Bob Eager wrote:

That assumes that the batteries in your local 3/4/5g mast work and all
the others in the chain to internet from your house.

Unless you have a dire need for connectivity personally I would not
bother.

Also if there are power cuts they are talking about keeping them in the
wee small hours when most people will be asleep

[Tweed]

What’s the point of a power cut in the middle of the night when demand is
low?

[Graham J]

grinch wrote:

[snip]

>
> Also if there are power cuts they are talking about keeping them in the
> wee small hours when most people will be asleep
>

No, the power cuts will be at peak industrial & domestic usage times: 7-
10 am and 4-7 pm. Think back to the winters of discontent in the 1970's.



--
Graham J

[Woody]

On Sun 09/10/2022 13:48, notya...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Sunday, 9 October 2022 at 13:24:29 UTC+1, Andrew Gabriel wrote:
>> On 09/10/2022 12:06, Bob Eager wrote:
>>> On Sun, 09 Oct 2022 10:46:50 +0100, Clive Page wrote:
>>>
> SNIP
>>>
>>> I wouldn't trust the cabinets to stay up long, although the OpenReach
>>> ones would be superior to (say) Virgin.
>
> BT telephone exchanges have battery back up and some have generators.
>
>>>
>>> I have two fallbacks. I have a 4G fallback dongle plugged into the
>>> router. That isn't very cheap but it works. For simple browsing, I use a
>>> tablet via a hotspot on my phone. I get about 12GB/month which is ample.
>> I'm not on Virgin, but around me, Virgin internet apparently goes off
>> instantly the mains supply fails, and also for some remote mains
>> failures when yours isn't impacted.
>>
>> I'm still on openreach ADSL2+, which I suspect is the most likely to
>> still work during a power cut, as it needs no power between you and the
>> exchange, as far as I know.
>
> AFAIK Openreach broadband cabinets receive data by fibre and have mains power. I doubt they have UPS, so would probably go off. PSTN cabinets have no mains and pass through -48V DC exchange power to phones etc. The broadband was put in new cabinets because the leaky old ones would be an H&S risk.
>

[snip]

Not quite. If the old cabs were leaky there would have been much
connection trouble caused by damp corrosion, and why would they be a H&S
risk?

AIUI the new cabs were installed for a H&S training reason. Standard
BTOR wiremen are only rated up top - IMSC - 150V peak. Ringing is
notionally 50V 25Hz a.c. which is about 140V peak. The new cabinets have
mains inside them so (a) they are spaced away from the normal wiring cab
- even across the road - and (b) a different tech theoretically trained
to a higher skill level has to access them.

[Bob Eager]

On Sun, 09 Oct 2022 13:50:05 +0100, grinch wrote:

>> I have two fallbacks. I have a 4G fallback dongle plugged into the
>> router. That isn't very cheap but it works. For simple browsing, I use
>> a tablet via a hotspot on my phone. I get about 12GB/month which is
>> ample.
>
> That assumes that the batteries in your local 3/4/5g mast work and all
> the others in the chain to internet from your house.
>
> Unless you have a dire need for connectivity personally I would not
> bother.

The 4G fallback has been useful, last time being when someone severed a
100 pair cable just down the road.

[Graham J]

At the end of our village there has been a BT cable dangling very low
for several months. Last Wednesday it broke: the weather was very
windy, so the dangling loop could have blown into the path of a lorry.

It was actually a fibre cable - black plastic sheath with a yellow
stripe. So the green cabinet in the centre of the village no longer
provided VDSL to all the users connected to it.

I reported the broken cable as a road safety hazard that afternoon.

It was fixed (or another fibre connected tot he green cabinet) on Friday
afternoon.

One could say that fibre is not very reliable; but in this case it was
very much inept original installation that caused the problem. Nothing
new there, I suppose!


--
Graham J

[Clive Page]

That's what I remember too. Power often went off at just the time you'd come home from work and wanted to cook dinner.

What I also remember is that houses in the street backing on to us had power when we didn't and vice-versa. Unfortunately we'd only just moved in so didn't know anybody around and didn't have the nerve to knock on a door of a random house in the next street and suggest that a long extension lead between our houses (e.g. through their back garden, across the alleyway, and then our back garden) might be to our mutual advantage. That might have been thought of as cheating the system after all. So we just sat in the dark and lit candles.

--
Clive Page

[Woody]

Silly question but why don't they just turn off more street light and in
particular motorways?.

[Java Jive]

On 09/10/2022 19:29, Woody wrote:
>
> Silly question but why don't they just turn off more street light and in
> particular motorways?.

Things may be different now, but then there was no remote control of
them, so I think a bod had to go round each one opening up the panel at
the base of it and switching it off. In Cambridge, where my parents
were living it at the time, I remember all of us coming home for
Christmas, and going for a walk in the early hours of the morning with
only one in about every two or three street lamps lit, very eery. So
much so that, ahem, I wrote a poem about it:

https://www.macfh.co.uk/Macfarlane/Poetry/CharlesMacfarlane/Blackout.html


--

Fake news kills!

I may be contacted via the contact address given on my website:
www.macfh.co.uk

[NY]

"notya...@gmail.com" <notya...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:d75b46bb-22f2-4160...@googlegroups.com...

> AFAIK Openreach broadband cabinets receive data by fibre and have mains
> power. I doubt they have UPS, so would probably go off. PSTN cabinets
> have no mains and pass through -48V DC exchange power to phones etc.

Is the FTTC equipment actually powered by mains or is it powered by the -48V
DC used for phones? If it's the latter, the exchange could act as a UPS. But
I bet it's not the case and a power cut will kill FTTC broadband and VOIP
phone.

Next time there's a long power cut, it might be worth someone with a UPS
that powers their router determining whether they still have an FTTC
broadband connection.

[Roderick Stewart]

On Sun, 9 Oct 2022 11:56:54 +0100, grinch <gri...@somewhere.com>
wrote:

>I would backup your router config as things have a nasty habit of not
>working properly or at all after power outages. Particularly old things.

I've tried switching off modems and routers to see how long they take
to recover when switched back on again, and never encountered a
problem of this type, but computers are another matter. It ought to be
possible to manage strategic money saving power cuts according to some
kind of timetable, but if they're planning to switch power off
unannounced at random intervals I think there will be a lot of very
annoyed people with computers that have lost important work, or in
some cases won't boot at all.

Rod.

[Marco Moock]

Am 09.10.2022 um 10:46:50 Uhr schrieb Clive Page:

> I'd like to keep our broadband going in the event of power cuts, so
> am thinking of getting a battery+inverter as backup

It highly depends on the type of them. I live in Germany and we have
passive components (just patch fields inside) and active components
like DSLAMs. To make your broadband work, all parts need to be on
power, so the routers at your provider also need power, their servers
too. Most providers have generators to keep their machines running, but
they normally last some hours, not days or weeks.

[Andy Burns]

NY wrote:

> Is the FTTC equipment actually powered by mains or is it powered by the -48V DC
> used for phones? If it's the latter, the exchange could act as a UPS. But I bet
> it's not the case and a power cut will kill FTTC broadband and VOIP phone.
>
> Next time there's a long power cut, it might be worth someone with a UPS that
> powers their router determining whether they still have an FTTC broadband
> connection.

I run my router, PoE switch, DECT/VoIP phone base on a UPS, I've only had one
powercut that was measured in hours since switching to FTTC, and the cabinet did
stay up until mains came back ... not sure if BT replace their batteries
regularly, have had several powercuts that are in the seconds or minutes range,
and the broadband certainly rides those out.

[Chris Green]

My home server machine which is permanently turned on doesn't have a
UPS. We're rural so we do get occasional power cuts (which my router
kindly tells me about by E-Mail afterwards). The server machine has
faithfully restarted after the couple of dozen or so power outages
we've had over the past few years. I do have a warm[ish] backup
system if it ever dies completely.

--
Chris Green
·

[Mark Carver]

On 09/10/2022 10:46, Clive Page wrote:

From personal experience at our last home, our FTTC cabinet was 1km
away on a different housing estate.

That estate lost power for the whole day. The FTTC cabinet kept going
for about 5 hours.

[BrightsideS9]

On Sun, 9 Oct 2022 19:29:57 +0100, Woody <harro...@ntlworld.com>
wrote:

According to this it is / was an experiment. Dated 2012.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/lighting-on-motorways-and-trunk-roads-in-england
It may be still ongoing as a slip road near me still has the warming
notice on the verge. Though I have never ventured out to check the
midnight to 0500 timings.

--
brightyside S9

[Mark Carver]

On 09/10/2022 20:12, Java Jive wrote:
> On 09/10/2022 19:29, Woody wrote:
>>
>> Silly question but why don't they just turn off more street light and
>> in particular motorways?.
>
> Things may be different now, but then there was no remote control of them,

Oh there is. Every street lamp in Hampshire is now remote controllable.
As I understand it key lamp posts have a 4G receiver built in, you can
spot them because the 'photocell' lump on top is larger than usual. That
receives on/off commands, and relays via I think a 400 MHz radio link to
all of its slave lamp-posts. You now notice all the street-lights in an
area coming on and off at *exactly* the same moment.

Lamp posts on all housing estates are now switched off between 1am and 5
am.  Other counties do the same. In West Berkshire the street lights on
the A4 between Theale and Thatcham are switched off between midnight and 5am

In Surrey you see lamp posts with little 'rubber duck' Rx antennas

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.3161351,-0.7315131,3a,15.1y,230.7h,102.48t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sBT59CojQQX5bg0onj5IzSg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

[Roderick Stewart]

If you've set up a home server, presumably you know what you're doing
and it's properly configured, and I'm guessing it might not even be
Windows, unlike the vast majority of domestic PCs in the wild.

Fingers crossed...

Rod.

[Graham J]

Chris Green wrote:

[snip]

>>
> My home server machine which is permanently turned on doesn't have a
> UPS. We're rural so we do get occasional power cuts (which my router
> kindly tells me about by E-Mail afterwards). The server machine has
> faithfully restarted after the couple of dozen or so power outages
> we've had over the past few years. I do have a warm[ish] backup
> system if it ever dies completely.

When I ran a small support busienss several years ago, I installed a
Dell server to run MS Windows SBS2003. It had a UPS and worked reliably
through many short power cuts over more than 5 years.

One day their power (in an extremely rural location) was off for many
hours, so the UPS told the server to shut down.

Once power was restored the UPS recharged, then told the server to
start. It did't, motherboard failure.

Skinflint customer had not paid for Dell maintenance, so had to buy a
new server.


--
Graham J

[Chris Green]

It's running Linux of course. Still not impossible to get screwed up
of the power goes down, but, as I said, it's managed pretty well for
several years now.

--
Chris Green
·

[Tony Mountifield]

In article <jqi3v0...@mid.individual.net>,

Our estate lost power for about 8 hours in one of the storms over the last
year or two (might have been Eunice). When power came back, the FTTC cabinet
didn't come back on, and it took Openreach several days to get round to
fixing it. Granted, they probably had a lot to do at that time, but it would
have been nice if the cabinet had powered back up on its own.

Cheers
Tony
--
Tony Mountifield
Work: to...@softins.co.uk - http://www.softins.co.uk
Play: to...@mountifield.org - http://tony.mountifield.org

[notya...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, 9 October 2022 at 15:11:32 UTC+1, Woody wrote:
> On Sun 09/10/2022 13:48, notya...@gmail.com wrote:

SNIP

> >>
> >> I'm still on openreach ADSL2+, which I suspect is the most likely to
> >> still work during a power cut, as it needs no power between you and the
> >> exchange, as far as I know.
> >
> > AFAIK Openreach broadband cabinets receive data by fibre and have mains power. I doubt they have UPS, so would probably go off. PSTN cabinets have no mains and pass through -48V DC exchange power to phones etc. The broadband was put in new cabinets because the leaky old ones would be an H&S risk.
> >
> [snip]
>
> Not quite. If the old cabs were leaky there would have been much
> connection trouble caused by damp corrosion, and why would they be a H&S
> risk?

The leaky old ones would have been an H & S risk if you put mains power in them.

I would presume that the new cabs have
1. Wiring laid out to isolate 240V from data connections, so one could work on the latter safely.
2. RCD protection.
3. Been designed not to leak.

>
> AIUI the new cabs were installed for a H&S training reason. Standard
> BTOR wiremen are only rated up top - IMSC - 150V peak. Ringing is
> notionally 50V 25Hz a.c. which is about 140V peak. The new cabinets have
> mains inside them so (a) they are spaced away from the normal wiring cab
> - even across the road - and (b) a different tech theoretically trained
> to a higher skill level has to access them.

PS you can get a belt off exchange voltage - I once stripped a phone cable with my teeth, only to be sharply remined that this one was still connected to the exchange...

Unpleasant, but not as bad as a main "belt" nor potentially lethal.

[Martin Brown]

On 10/10/2022 10:24, Roderick Stewart wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Oct 2022 09:25:45 +0100, Chris Green <c...@isbd.net> wrote:
>
>> Roderick Stewart <rj...@escapetime.myzen.co.uk> wrote:
>>> On Sun, 9 Oct 2022 11:56:54 +0100, grinch <gri...@somewhere.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I would backup your router config as things have a nasty habit of not
>>>> working properly or at all after power outages. Particularly old things.
>>>
>>> I've tried switching off modems and routers to see how long they take
>>> to recover when switched back on again, and never encountered a
>>> problem of this type, but computers are another matter. It ought to be
>>> possible to manage strategic money saving power cuts according to some
>>> kind of timetable, but if they're planning to switch power off
>>> unannounced at random intervals I think there will be a lot of very
>>> annoyed people with computers that have lost important work, or in
>>> some cases won't boot at all.
>>>
>> My home server machine which is permanently turned on doesn't have a
>> UPS. We're rural so we do get occasional power cuts (which my router
>> kindly tells me about by E-Mail afterwards). The server machine has
>> faithfully restarted after the couple of dozen or so power outages
>> we've had over the past few years. I do have a warm[ish] backup
>> system if it ever dies completely.

A server without a UPS is asking for trouble. You will get away with it
most times but it will be a royal PITA if it goes down completely.

> If you've set up a home server, presumably you know what you're doing
> and it's properly configured, and I'm guessing it might not even be
> Windows, unlike the vast majority of domestic PCs in the wild.
>
> Fingers crossed...

Windows is a lot better now than it used to be unless you set silly
options for SSD write caching without having the benefit of a UPS.

Office usually manages to recover work in progress to within the last 10
minutes or so of a power fail. Sometimes the OS does brick itself but
that is comparatively rare now compared to past versions where it was
the norm.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

[Martin Brown]

Probably back to some quite remote exchange that is so far way it will
be on a different schedule. The larger BT premises also tend to have
decent backup supplies easily able to cope with a few hours no supply.
Mine is a 15 mile fibre run back to the county town phone exchange.

Failure mode during storm Arwen was POTS stayed good, FFTC went down
(cabinets need mains power) and mobiles failed within 48 hours. This
killed mobile phone batteries doing ET call home probes at maximum TX power.

After that you had to drive to the edge of the dead zone to get within
range of a working base station that had a mains feed. Easier said than
done in some of the more remote areas during a snow storm.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

[NY]

"Chris Green" <c...@isbd.net> wrote in message
news:9h1d1j-...@esprimo.zbmc.eu...

> Roderick Stewart <rj...@escapetime.myzen.co.uk> wrote:
> My home server machine which is permanently turned on doesn't have a
> UPS. We're rural so we do get occasional power cuts (which my router
> kindly tells me about by E-Mail afterwards). The server machine has
> faithfully restarted after the couple of dozen or so power outages
> we've had over the past few years. I do have a warm[ish] backup
> system if it ever dies completely.

Likewise for my Windows 7 PC. That is booted almost 24/7 - either running or
sleeping (to memory, rather than to disk because the Hibernate option
doesn't seem to exist). It normally boots fine after a power cut or brief
1-second interruption.

The only thing that it doesn't like is a rapid series of power
interruptions: occasionally the power will go off, come on, go off, come on
and stay on, at about 1-second intervals between changes of state. That
sometimes corrupts the in-memory state of the computer so it tries to
restore from the memory image rather than recognising that the image is
"stale" and booting from cold.

Twice I've had it perform a CHKDSK to detect and fix corrupt files; both
times it has found problems with obscure files which either it has been able
to correct (NTFS's file-correction is pretty good) or else the files are not
critical to booting/running and have not been detected in normal use of the
PC afterwards. There may have been other times, but if it happens overnight,
the PC will be booted by the time I come to it in the morning so I don't
know whether it has CHKDSKed.

[Andrew Gabriel]

The streetlamps are all on a Zigbee mesh network, using a module which
plugs into a conventional 3-prong NEMA photocell socket on the top of
the lantern. Actually, the sockets are slightly modified to allow extra
connections for both DALI and 0-10V dimming control of the lamp too, for
those with dimmable gear. About one in 250 streetlamps has a physically
larger controller which bridges the local Zigbee mesh to 4G. That also
contains a daylight sensor and temperature sensor, which report back to
the central control (but don't directly control the lights). The
temperature sensing can be used to identify pockets which might need
gritting. (Sometimes these are mounted on dedicated columns without a
lamp to prevent any lamp disturbing the temperature sensing.)

Each streetlamp is individually addressable via the mesh network for
on/off/dim and also sends back power consumption data for metering and
identifying failed lamps. Individual lamps don't have daylight sensing,
so their NEMA module is opaque (as opposed to a conventional NEMA
photocell which is translucent) and just has an internal Zigbee aerial.

Andrew Gabriel