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UFB disaster?

22 June 2015

The good old POTS (plain old telephone system) is great in a disaster.

Even if the mains was out and the cellphone network was down, POTS almost always kept on providing a communications lifeline in times of civil defence emergency resulting from floods, earthquake or whatever.

The Christchurch earthquake was a great example of how badly things can go wrong with the mobile network when a natural disaster strikes and surprisingly, despite the failure of mains power and the physical disruption to cables, POTS still worked in many parts of the city.

Although many had to hunt out an old corded phone, they still had dialtone and could still place/receive calls.

However, in the new age of UFB, your land-line probably won't work -- that's because government chose not to require service providers to offer a battery backup as part of their fibre offering.

WTF?

The beauty of POTS was that not only did it deliver the voice signal to your home via a copper pair, it also delivered 50V of DC -- regardless of the status of your mains power.

Each exchange has a huge 50V power supply, backed up by batteries and often a diesel generator, so as to ensure that service could still be provided when the mains was out.

Although Kiwis have embraced mobile technology with open arms and despite the fact that most calls are made using the cellular network rather than the fixed-line network, that fixed-line network is still a crucial part of our infrastructure and becomes invaluable in times of civil emergency.

Or at least it used to be.

Once we've transitioned from copper to fibre however, the fixed-line network will become as useless as tits on a bull in the event of mains outages.

Because they feared that the cost of battery backup would put some people off switching to fibre, the government (in the form of Crown Fibre) decided that they would not require service providers to offer such a backup as an option.

Come on, seriously?

Perhaps the cost of a mandatory battery backup may have an effect on UFB uptake but simply making the option available?

Given the increasing frequency with which we're seeing some very significant (usually weather-related) natural disasters striking NZ, it seems absolute folly that any government would deliberately promote a policy that sees our fixed-line phone system rendered useless the moment the mains power fails.

And just how much would such a battery backup cost as an option?

Well I'm picking that the retail price would be around $100 or so -- hardly a king's ransom.

A lithium-ion battery and simple charging circuit would do the job and provide several critical hours of backup -- so who wouldn't plump for that option as a one-time cost?

Sadly, because I live in rented accommodation, I don't have fibre but perhaps readers who do can enlighten the rest of us as to whether their UFB gear has user-level provision for the addition of a battery backup or operation via an external source of DC power.

If not... I'd want to know why not.

Do you think it's a silly idea to deliberately cripple the fixed-line network in the event of any disaster that takes out the mains power from a region?

What will people say if/when we encounter the types of power shortages experienced a few years ago when rationing was almost forced upon us due to extremely low lake levels in the South Island? Now we're a nation that virtually lives online (via their household broadband connection and WiFi links to phones, tablets and laptops, do you think we'd be happy to put up with a protracted losses of connectivity due to mains outages killing our UFB?

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