Re: Surge Protection

[Daniel Senie <dts () senie com>]

At 11:56 AM 7/22/2004, you wrote:

> Have anyone experienced hardware failure related to electrical spikes 
> coming into your datacenters or equipment locations via the telco 
> facilities?  I am referring specifically to copper facilities for DS1's, 
> etc.  I know that the telco must maintain good grounding, but sometimes 
> when you get hit with a few Gigavolts worth of electrical energy not much 
> will help you.  Whatever the case, has anyone had any experience good or 
> otherwise with surge protection for their Telcom circuits?  I am looking 
> at this unit below as a possible solution.

Rule #1, don't trust the telco or the power company, or anyone else feeding 
wires into your building to do a good job keeping you safe from surges.

A client of mine has what used to be a CSU/DSU... now has surface mount 
components missing and the like. They hadn't installed a surge protector on 
the T-1. They had covered the power and the antenna coaxes at the site. 
Only the T-1 line was unprotected. Lightning will find that one path you've 
not protected.

The cost of installing a surge protector is unlikely to impact your bottom 
line. One successful lightning strike on the other hand will hurt quite a 
bit, and probably happen at 4AM just to be more annoying.