RE: Verizon FiOS - is BGP an option?

[Wallace Keith <kwallace () pcconnection com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Bulk [mailto:frnkblk () iname com] 
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2012 5:27 PM
To: 'William Herrin'
Cc: nanog () nanog org
Subject: RE: Verizon FiOS - is BGP an option?

A good portable generator is more than $500, and if it's a wide-spread outage there's not enough portable generators to 
go around, and if there were, not enough people to set them and give them their fluids.  And it doesn't pay to put a 
natural gas (or similar) generator at every node for those rare instances where the battery does not suffice.

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: William Herrin [mailto:bill () herrin us]
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2012 2:31 PM
To: Seth Mattinen
Cc: nanog () nanog org
Subject: Re: Verizon FiOS - is BGP an option?

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 8:51 AM, Seth Mattinen <sethm () rollernet us> wrote:

<snip>

> The central plant days are mostly gone; there's fiber huts everywhere 
> and not enough trucks/manpower (in my area a lineman sits in his truck 
> and reads a book while tethered to the power
> kiosk) to run them all if the outage is too widespread for too long.

They put a quarter million dollars into the fiber hut. They can't put a $500 gasoline generator in a warehouse 50 miles 
away and go pick it up when there's an extended outage?

I'll give Verizon a little credit. They restored service after about
12 hours of outage. Cox didn't restore service until 12 hours *after* my power came back on.

Could be worse. I could have Pepco instead of Dominion. But it could be better. And 20 years ago the reliability was.

-Bill

--
William D. Herrin ................ herrin () dirtside com  bill () herrin us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004


One would think the head end of the fiber would have batteries and a generator.  I have TDS fiber at home and I believe 
it goes all the way back to the CO with no active items between.  I do have UPS's and a genset to keep the ONT and 
servers running.  Here in Fairpoint (former Verizon) land, most of the SLC  huts I've seen,  have either a genset or a 
plug for a mobile generator on the side of the bldg. The generators in the service vehicles can plug into these.  The 
cable (HFC)  infrastructure, on the other hand, has pole mounted power supplies that apparently (to me) go dead within 
an hour of a power failure.  No way to back them up easily that I can see.
Running BGP and hosting over a residential service such as cable or DSL, has it's limitations as I have learned. I 
doubt your LEC  has an SLA for DSL service.  I would look at hosting somewhere  closer to your eyeball networks and let 
them worry about power, cooling and network availability.

-Keith