One thing I missed on my post on relying on Vonage is our other single point of failure: Kansas City Power and Light. We’re about to enter storm season here in Tornado Alley, which is frequently spectacular if somewhat unnerving. We don’t get many outages, but they do happen. Last Christmas, the moment I headed back to Europe we had one. My home server got stuck on rebooting at a screen asking if I wanted to repair filesystems that might have been corrupted due to incorrect shutdown. So I couldn’t access a ton of my email and files.
A traditional criticism of VoIP solutions is that the analog PSTN is powered at the edges, and smart VoIP endpoints depend on being powered from the unreliable mains power. (Don’t lick your fingers and stick them in those phone sockets kids! Someone might ring you with a ring tone you won’t want to feel again…)
But I’ve had several experiences that have shown me that this isn’t a very strong argument. I’ve been in Scottish winter storms where both power and telephone service has been knocked out to rural areas. And the 2002 ice storm in Kansas City had telephone and power lines down over half the city. (The blue and purple arcing of failing power lines was quite a scene from our balcony.) Clearly there is a significant correlation between failure of the telephony network and the power network. It might be interesting to have some facts on the relationship. Anyone out there know what the correlation coefficient might be?
Posted by Martin Geddes at 09:49 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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This must vary from area to area. I kept track a few years ago with a nailed up dsl line vs local power. Connectivity to the CO averaged about 1 minute of downtime a year (over 6 years ... most years had zero downtime ... note that this was connectivity - not net). Power to the same location was down an average of 9 hr 14 min a year.
I haven't been keeping track at home, but suspect a similar spread. In central NJ AC power is pretty unreliable.
Posted by: at April 28, 2004 03:04 PMFYI just for preventing your own gear from going down UPSes work pretty well, as long as you avoid hooking your monitor up to it. If you are a cheapskate (like I am) just wait for free after rebate sales. You will pick up about 3 UPSes a year that way.
Unless your DSL/cable/whatever providers equipment is up you won't have connectivity during an outage, but you won't have to fear a "bad reboot".
(note: a whole house generator while nice, normally does not remove the need for UPSes because you have a power interruption while the generator spins up, and you have *more* of them because you should test run them monthly!)
Posted by: at May 3, 2004 09:11 AM