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#71
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"G.R. Patterson III" wrote:
Ron Natalie wrote: That is the primary stopper right there. It's hard enough to set up line sharing even when everything is straightforward. I can't imagine trying to convince them how to do line-sharing on a line which has nothing on it to share. What telephone number ? BellSouth treats this as an order for a special service ("2W DSL") loop. The loop is identified by cable and line pair, rather than telephone number. I have no idea how it's billed, but I worked on a project for them which helps them set up the order. Well, in my case "how it's billed" is rather touchy. After NUMEROUS iterations (works, doesn't work, works but you're billing me twice, ...), SBC finally resorted to marking my residential account as a "major business customer" so that the ninnies would shy away from touching it (for fear of getting reamed for screwing a big $ customer). Peace ever since. :-) Russell Kent |
#72
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In article , Roy Smith wrote:
In addition, central offices and other switching facilities have emergency backup generators. As soon as the commercial power goes down, the generators are supposed to crank up and keep things going for as long as the diesel fuel holds out. Yup. I used to work in a central office (CO) building until earlier this year. It was grand! The worst complaint we'd have is a momentary brownout affecting the computer room power about once a year or so -- we have certain machines that are ultra-sensitive to brownouts and logs unique error (but easily identified) messages without loss of functionality whenever a brownout occurs, so that's how we know. But other than that, it just... works. In fact, the CO power people runs a full test of their building (commercial) / UPS (we're talking *industrial* sized UPS systems, not the kind you buy in stores -- I've seen a power guy literally hanging off a crowbar with all of his 250 pounds trying to remove a large electrical circuit for power work in the basement of the CO during a 1am maintenance!) / cutover strategies. Usually scheduled as a midnight-4am maintenance window... they spend the first hour going through the whole building, room by room (I've been there once or twice when it happens) to make sure all occupants are safely out or have working emergency gear (eg flashlights) and knows the exact 'escape route'. I can say that it is *very* different walking around in a completely dark building even when you know the exact steps by heart! Then with the flip of a switch, most of the building goes dark. Rooms (eg computer room, switch room, rooms with MDFs, etc) on the internal UPS power stays alive. So no interruption in phone or data services. Only interruption is mostly with lights / computers of offices in building, which is mostly why they do it off-hours. (The call center is also on the UPS if I recall.) They then run whatever individual tests they like. Doesn't take long. By 3am at the latest, they start restoring commercial power to various circuits in a controlled and staggered fashion. Also, twice a year they run a smaller scale version of that power cutover test to building UPS power during a work day and hours, and nobody notices a thing when it *does* happen (also been there then, too). Not even a flicker. I've heard of other telcos including a competitor in town doing similar sorts of full-scale tests every 6 to 12 months. It helps people spot issues in the procedures, and keeps people current on how to respond. That's a far cry from many (most?) places in general (non-telco) that may have alternative sources of power but *don't* regularly actually _verify_ things are still good, before the need pops up for real in an emergency. I've seen the huge diesel generator in the basement. I think I once heard that the CO in question was required to ensure they had at least a 14 day supply in case of serious emergency (which would also include blackouts -- typically due to ice storms, which is a familiar phenomenon in this part of country). (Presumably, by the end of 14 day window, there would be a way to ship in additional diesel fuel, to keep going on... indefinitely -- as long as fuel delivery can be guaranteed, until commercial power is back. COs are pretty high on the list of places to get power restored due to public safety considerations.) So I don't usually worry about dialtone for landline phones in case of an emergency. (The system is not perfect, and it *is* indeed possible to lose that service as experience and human nature / fickle nature of Murphy has shown us, but on the whole, it's pretty well designed and robust.) -Dan (For the big blackout of 2003 affecting the east: I was out at home from 4:11pm until about 11:15pm when my home router came back; I was at work bringing systems back up carefully once power was restored and didn't get home until 4:30am with last report written and sent at 6am. That night sucked! Fire crew came by at work because of flooding in data center due to sump pumps NOT being on the data center UPS supply and they were afraid of arcing and other concerns... we quickly had that rewired in record time!) |
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