Your Cable Company -- powered by the guy with the extension cord

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren () vortex com>
Date: August 12, 2006 6:45:41 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: lauren () vortex com
Subject: Your Cable Company -- powered by the guy with the extension  
cord


Dave,

Last night at around 2:15am (yup, everyone's just leaving the bars)
my area had a widespread power failure when someone wrapped
themselves around a main distribution line power pole (this is a
Friday and Saturday night tradition of course).  While LADWP started
on it pretty quickly, power was not restored for around seven
hours.

That long an outage is enough to expose one of the serious weak points
in our telecom networks -- remotely situated batteries.  They don't
last very long without external charging power, and we already know
that microcell sites tend to go down quickly for this reason when
power fails.

Early this morning when I started walking the area to see the
effects, I quickly found an unmarked white bucket truck with engine
running, parked at a nearby corner, with an orange extension cord
running from its open hood to the open cable backup power box on the
nearby pole, containing what looked like about three gel cells.

When I went over and talked to the friendly cable guy splicing wires
on the back of his truck, he told me that he wasn't even trying to
charge the batteries, all he could do was try to keep the system
running from his truck until power was restored.

Cable modems?  Cable VoIP?  Our whole world of modern cable telecom,
dependent on a guy with an extension cord and an old bucket truck.

I found it rather amusing, in a "sad commentary" sort of way.

--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren () vortex com or lauren () pfir org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
   - People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, IOIC
   - International Open Internet Coalition - http://www.ioic.net
Moderator, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
DayThink: http://daythink.vortex.com



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