Re: 292 cellular towers out of service due to generator failure

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, Thornton wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-09-06 at 15:41, Sean Donelan wrote:
> > Due to a generator failure, 292 Sprint wireless towers in Polk, Pasco,
> > Hillsborough, Pinellas, Manatee, Hardee, Sarasota and Charlotte counties
> > were disrupted.  There is no estimated time for restoration of power
> > to the Sprint switch serving the towers.
>
> For that many towers to have power generator issues makes you wonder if
> they had power generators to begin w/. Maybe they just had a few hours
> worth of UPS power or something.

The FCC is no longer releasing outage reports from the carriers, so this
is based on information from the local newspapers.

Generally large numbers of cellular towers in a region are fed from a
central switch.  If the central switch looses power, then all the towers
connected to that switch loose service.  In this case, the backup
generator for the central switched failed.  The switch was on battery
backup until 9pm, but when it became apparent that neither the utility
power nor the generator would be restored soon, Sprint shutoff the switch
to prevent damage from low battery voltage.  This will speed the restoration
effort when utility power or the generator is finally fixed because the
switch will be damaged.