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Goodbye reliable landline

As a child I remember being astounded by the fact that when the power went off, the phone still worked.

Not living in a big city meant that the power would go out several times a year, usually as a result of strong winds bringing trees down on lines. During those times we'd light candles and cook on a little camp stove.

Looking back, it's quite amazing how little effect such power outages had. No internet to stop working, no computers to sit with blank screens, plenty of books around to occupy us when the TV stopped working and no cordless phones.

Often, when the lights went out, the first thing we did was call the neighbours to see if their power was also out. Yes, the good old copper-based landline still worked, no matter the state of the mains electricity supply.

When I started training for a career in communications technology I soon learned why it was that the phone seemed immune to the effects of power cuts.

The old land-line phones were powered by 50V DC that came down the copper from the nearest exchange. Those exchanges had huge lead-acid backup batteries that were kept on a floating charge and automatically delivered the essential power if the mains failed. Of course on all but the smallest exchanges there was also a large diesel generator so the integrity of the phone system was very, very good.

However, times (and technology) changes so that pretty soon, although the exchanges still had those big batteries and generators, most households eventually switched from hard-wired phones to cordless units. Once this happened, people suddenly discovered the weak-link. If the power went out then the base-unit stopped working and thus they no longer had a working telephone.

It was a silly person who didn't keep one of those old wired-phones in a cupboard somewhere for just such an occasion.

And now we're switching to fibre and decommissioning the copper that used to bring a useful and pretty bullet-proof phone service to our homes and businesses.

Smart folk might choose to power their fibre modem/phone from a UPS - but even that will only deliver minutes of backup operation, rather than the day or two that you could expect from the copper-based service.

Of course this isn't really the problem we might think because each and every one of us also has a mobile phone that operates through the cellular network. Phew!

Don't get too complacent however. Many of today's smartphones simply don't last more than a day or so without needing a recharge -- and if your power is off you'll need a car-charger or other method to keep your lines of communications working in the event of a major outage. One must also wonder how long the cell-tower nearest you will keep working on its own backup batteries or generator when the power goes out.

Most folk right now are probably thinking -- "yeah, but how often does the power go out and even when it does, how often is that outage more than an hour or two?"

Well spare a thought for the thousands of folk in Christchurch who faced protracted outages a while back and even today as well as those up North who are facing days without any form of mains power as a result of the storms of recent days.

In fact, with climate scientists predicting that we're going to face increasingly violent weather systems in coming years, maybe we should be paying more attention to contingency plans in the event of losing our power for days at a time.

What (if any) measures have you taken to mitigate the effect of a protracted power outage?

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