Landlines and Princess phones

TidBITS Talk
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Indeed. There is no “switch-over” lag (none) when the grid power fails. The standby generator automatically starts within a minute to continue the recharging process and run the the AC-powered HVAC and a few other things.

Back in the monopoly days, the shore power serving perhaps the largest section of suburban Omaha failed. This included the telco switch (Central Office). The standby generator started but experienced a catastrophic failure within minutes and shut down.

Anyone with working knowledge of the flooded lead acid battery knows that you do NOT run them dead. They will “sulfate” and the plates warp. You can permanently destroy such a battery by running it until it’s dead.

The grid outage was protracted and the Central Office technician, in an extremely rare move, shut down the dialtone to save the battery when it depleted to a deep degree. Since then, all Central Offices, despite each being equipped with a standby generator, have been retrofitted with external power ports to which a large, trailer-mounted generator can be attached.

I found an image that is representative of what’s in use today. I see someone has already posted a photo. I’ll still post mine. It is representative of an OLDER battery. When “my” C.O. was upgraded, the battery, which had been on a couple rows of LONG shelves, was replaced with an entire ROOM and perhaps twice the storage capacity. The new cells were rectangular and presumably of the same capacity.

This is the part of “alternative” energy of which most proponents are unaware. From an environmental perspective, there is much to be concerned about, not the least of which is lead. The burden on the environment in the manufacture of these batteries is surely considerable. The same must be considered at the end-of-life.

Of course, such batteries are not part of most wind and solar operations. Those are just “peaking” add-ons to the common grid. When the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining, the grid operators just burn more fossil fuel to meet demand.

It’s the “isolated” town or three in Alaska that have created a stand-alone, public power system that uses such a battery (above). The biggest impediment to “alternative” energy isn’t the generation of the power. It’s the STORAGE. We still have a long way to go.

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When my ONT power system broke they replaced it with an even older one with. Within a month it was beeping with battery problems. I have since removed a battery and plug it into a UPS. But all of my phones require power beyond what is provided by the phone system.

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Yuck. Giving you a unit with a dead battery wasn’t very nice.

Using your own UPS is probably best, since it will keep your data service running during an outage, while the built-in battery only keeps the voice service running. You can replace the built-in battery if you want, but it probably isn’t necessary if your UPS is big enough.

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In reference to this and your other comments.

Here in central NC/RDU, and I suspect in other areas, much (becoming most) copper does NOT go back to the CO. But only to a neighborhood pod. And then fiber back to the CO. Much of the copper back to the CO from the neighborhood cross connect cabinets has been basically abandoned. So these neighborhood pods have AC power from the local grid and a battery to run the fiber/copper converters for a “while”. Where “while” is no where near as long as it was back in the day of huge batteries at the CO. And I suspect that much of that fiber routes through the cell towers or them through these pods to keep costs down.

For years many of the “Bells” have had policies where if you switched to fiber in the home they would not let you go back to copper. Now they are actually removing copper DSL support to some houses and telling people they have to switch to fiber.

Not sure about land line phones. That likely gets tied up in legacy regulations that vary by state. But as us old farts die off (literally) the demand for land lines is going down rapidly. I tossed mine over 5 years ago. Maybe 10.

Ironically I have more “things” from the pole to the side of my house than 20 years ago. A Google fiber run (never used), 2 coax Spectrum runs (both in use just now but one to go away), 2 copper phone runs (not in use). And if I do want to pickup Bellsouth fiber the patch “barrel” hangs just above my driveway entrance so it will not be all that hard for them to connect me up. (At various times I’ve had both business and residential service which is why some of the dual cables.)

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This is the way telcos have been able to extend DSL service to customers who live too far from the central office for a high speed link.

They run fiber to a central location in a neighborhood, where they have installed a DSLAM. The copper lines from customer sites all terminate at that DSLAM instead of continuing all the way to the central office.

By doing this, the length of the analog DSL line (from your home to the DSLAM) is greatly reduced, allowing higher speed DSL without the significantly greater expense of running fiber all the way to everybody’s homes.

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Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, DSL was strictly limited to 18,000 feet. I live just inside Route 128/95 in Boston, but I could not get DSL because my house was 18,050 feet from the central office. Running fibers to DSLAMs solves that problem where DSL is still viable; I have had fiber to the home since around 2005, and with two competitive networks–Comcast and RCN–in town I doubt there’s any place for DSL today.

It’s standard in the industry now to use fiber drops to cell towers, and fiber also runs out to neighborhood coax distribution nodes in “non-fiber” cable systems. As 5G is rolled out in metro areas, fiber will come closer to homes because the 26-28 GHz radio carriers that 5G uses to deliver broadband and video has a very limited range.

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Just a minor correction. The telco’s end of your DSL line always terminates at a port on a DSLAM. That DSLAM may be in a central office building or it may be installed in your neighborhood (on a pole or in a box on someone’s lawn), but it always exists.