Our Cell phones quit Immediately in the San Diego power outage:

[sfpcjock]

Don't expect yours to work. A landline usually will, BTW. You need to have drinking water in your house.

http://www.ehow.com/about_5397187_do-phones-work-power-outages.html"> Cell Tower Backup Power

"Verizon reminds investors that the FCC imposes "specific mandates" on wireless carriers including "backup electric power at most cell sites." Therefore, cell towers typically have battery backup arrangements that support operations for two to four hours, depending upon call traffic.
In 2008 the FCC wanted to order an eight-hour minimum, but the Bush administration asked for more study.
In critical service areas, battery backup is enhanced by generators that automatically start when the batteries cannot provide enough power."

Huh?

[cdsilv]

1. billing computers probably went offline, so they shut the system down - gotta vacuum them $$$ ....

[sfpcjock]

2. lol

Our cell tower looks just like pictured. It may even have a battery backup as it says the FCC requires. I'm guessing that because the 2 Megawatt San Onofre nuclear power plant tripped offline due to a severe voltage drop from the Yuma line going down, that some large cell phone switching station also went down at that time. Still, in an earthquake, tsunami, etc. type disaster I guess we can't expect our phones to work. This seems surprising.

Our house no longer has a land line, and I will call the cops today and remind them of what happened.

[snooper2]

13. Billing "computers" don't work like that but I can explain how they do if you would like?

[Missy Vixen]

15. My husband used to work for a company that made software

that harvested billing information from cell phone switches.

I believe you're right: Revenue is Job One. If they can't recover billing information, they're not approving anything longer than that four hour window.

Yes, I am cynical...

[begin_within]

3. Mine worked the whole time.

T-mobile. But it was a bit crackly, not as clear as usual.

[Sirveri]

4. Land lines have batteries in the boxes and maintain power for days.

I would love it if I had a real land line again, the wife ordered a bundle plan for the internet and tv and put us on VOIP and I didn't have the heart to yell at her about it. Now whenever the power and internet goes down, so does our home phone. Thank god I have a cell phone and don't live in a spotty coverage area.

[jemsan]

5. My landline worked intermittently as did my cell phone..

texting and email worked great most of the time. Charged my phone and ipad batteries in my Prius in the driveway while I ate my dinner. All in all not a bad evening. The moon and the stars were awesome.

[Renew Deal]

11. Had a similar experience in NY after the earthquake.

It was pretty much impossible to make a voice call from a cell phone. But text and email worked well.

[Sirveri]

24. that's a tad odd, normally the phone lines should stay up unless the lines are damaged.

It's just a simple 50 VDC tone, not all that hard to maintain.

[RegieRocker]

27. Landline smandline it needs electricity to work also. Who told you

about batteries that last for days? I researched this. They do have batteries but the thing that makes this work is backup generators. Without those the batteries would be dead in hours due to heavy usage. Cell phone companies could offer the same thing.

[Sirveri]

28. yes, 50 VDC tone, 90 VDC ring, 10 VDC in use. Batteries implies they need electricity.

That said, I was told that the big switch boxes all had batteries in them. Maybe the big switching stations have backup generators too. The difference is that landlines are all hard wired to each other and so you can maintain a charge on the circuit. Cell towers are all separate so you'd need a generator for each tower, then maintenance teams for them and refuel trucks for long duration outages. As for the batteries, I heard that one from my previous boss who seemed to know a lot about phone systems but I didn't really delve to deep into his background. But I do know from experience that one can have batteries that have a pretty massive capacity, since I served on a submarine and actually saw them in action. If you can move a 6000 ton piece of metal through the water (even if it's only at 5 knots) for an hour on the battery, I'm pretty sure you can make a set of batteries that when networked can support the phone network for a day or two.

[RegieRocker]

33. There is a lot of wire in those hills.

http://www.ctnow.com/business/hc-att-landline-outages-20110831,0,3183739.story

This might be useful to you. Everything I see points directly to generators for more than a few hours of operation on batteries. Also your submarine analogy is different. Once you get the mass moving it doesn't take as much to keep it moving. Phones however become massively used during a black out or in a disaster. I've been working with electricity for over 38 yrs now. Believe me you don't want to be touching the telephone wires when a call comes in. The amount of resistance and the load has to be extremely large. I use to work for the phone company in the switching office. The generators came on rather quickly in a outage.

[Sirveri]

34. hmmm well that's some cool new info. Oh, if the sub doesn't move, it sinks.

and water resistance and getting the shaft turning fast enough just to make 5 knots... lets just say that it's got a dedicated DC bus that's only separated via a disconnect from the battery... Also the battery runs the length of almost half the boat. Fun times. Actually I used to install alarms and had to hook into the phones quite a lot, brushed between some frayed insulation on the phone wire and a copper pipe, wasn't very fun.

[RegieRocker]

36. Lol yea I guess not. I was a radio relay and microwave

repairman in the Army (Signal Corp). I've had my share of zaps. You were right about the batteries I was just pointing out that it also requires backup generators. When the sub is running on batteries is that called silent running? Just a guess. With nuclear is that still applicable? This has been good conversation.

[Sirveri]

37. Silent we still run the reactor. PITA to start and stop it.

Another issue is the pumps in the loops, when ever the flow changes you get check valve slams which make a ton of noise (they're like 10" diameter valves). Plus we have to shut down air conditioning... screw that noise.

Actually, the subs today are so quiet that we don't really care about silent running, in fact we normally can't detect another sub until we're basically on top of it.

Has been fun, love shop talk.

[krispos42]

35. It's a question of how big the batteries are.

And how much money you want to put into the battery back.

At some point, it becomes cheaper to install a generator with a big fuel tank (or one that runs off of a natural-gas line) than buy the batteries.

An example:

Exide makes a battery for golf cars, the GC-145, that is 6 volts and can discharge at 25 amps for 525 minutes, or 75 amps for 145 minutes. It weighs about 30 pounds.

25 amps at 6 volts is 150 watts. 150 watts x 525 minutes x 60 seconds/minute = 4,725,000 joules = 1.313 kilowatt-hours of energy storage.

I found that battery for sale on-line for $153.



I can purchase a 1600-watt Briggs & Stratton #030473-0 generator for $650. It weights about 50 pounds.

According to Briggs & Stratton, it runs for 6.5 hours (390 minutes) at ¼ load on 1 gallon of gasoline. So that 400 watts x 390 minutes x 60 seconds/minute = 9,360,000 joules = 2.6 kilowatt-hours of energy storage.

But, I can buy a gallon of gas for $4, and double that to 5.2 kWh.





So if I only need a little bit of power, a battery makes much more sense: cheaper, quiet, doesn't require routine maintenance, won't kill you with carbon-monoxide fumes.

But if I need a lot of power, then the generator makes far more sense.

For a $900 investment, I can get 6 batteries from Exide and get 7.878 kWh, or I can buy one generator and 65 gallons of gas, which gets me 169 kWh, over 21x the power.

[Tesha]

29. Telephone central offices have big batteries and standby generators.

As long as they have fuel, a hardline to the central office
will stay operational.

Unfortunately for us, we were connected via a "concentrator"
and it only had an hour or so of battery and no generator so
our landline used to reliably fail an hour or so after the
power went.

Tesha

[NNN0LHI]

6. Bet it had more to do with the lines being overloaded than lack of electricity

Same think happened to my cell phone right after 9/11 and I am in Illinois. Wasn't due to losing electricity.

Don

[itsrobert]

20. Exactly, the towers were working, but they were overloaded

By people you thought it was the end of the world their power went out. Businesses shutting down and telling their employees to go home all at the same time didn't help much.

[Donnachaidh]

7. guess those smartphones ain't so smart, eh?

I loves me some landlines.

Wait till a huge quake hits and the only calls getting out will be on landlines.

[Shagbark Hickory]

8. ._.. ... ._..

Ham radio.

[sfpcjock]

18. My neighbor is an old Navy ham: Howard Dixon

[Ezlivin]

21. 73's to you

I keep my Icom IC-92AD charged and ready to go at all times. When the power goes out, I'm on the air.

[Shagbark Hickory]

25. Good. Because when the power is out the city's multimillion dollar trunking system...

the first responders may very well need your help relaying messages.

[nadinbrzezinski]

31. Locally they are on an 800 system with independent power

So power outage, they were fine.

[Renew Deal]

9. You need every part of the infrastructure to work in a power outage.

You can't have 1 single up-link outage for the system to work. That's doubtful. Besides that, most home phones are connected to an IP service instead of a hard wired telephone line. That means if the power goes out, you need the network infrastructure to work including the routers and switches IN YOUR HOUSE.

Another issue is that everyone is going to rush to mobile phones in an major event. We saw this in NY with the earthquake. It was impossible to make a voice call to or from a cell phone. The cell infrastructure was beyond capacity.

So battery backup on the towers is nice, but what about further up the line? :shrug:

[Broderick]

10. Power outages can be deadly

Especially to those on home oxygen, etc.

[nadinbrzezinski]

32. The EMS and hospitals took care of that

Thankfully it was an annoyance mostly.

[sarcasmo]

12. Call and ask your cell company to refund you for that day missed.

They would sure let you know if you were a day late with your bill.

[JayhawkSD]

14. My phones worked fine

My Cox landline was never down at all.
Verizon worked fine, but on one attempt failed to connect for collecting messages.
Of course the cordless phones were dead. Heh. That's why I have one which is not cordless.

[kenny blankenship]

16. But you'll need an old fashioned corded phone for your landline to work

The kind that doesn't need to be plugged into the house AC to work, or have any batteries in the handset. (batteries might not last as long as the blackout)

[bikebloke]

17. That's what I have.

Only beige with a bit of yellowing on the side that faced the window. I don't have a mobile and am sticking to my land line.

[Honeycombe8]

19. Electrical power is needed to operate cell phones? I thought they used radio waves or something?

Those towers...they're not electrical, are they? (the ones that cell phones have to have, in order to work)

No, here in Dallas TX...if our electrical power goes out, cell phones still work.

[slackmaster]

23. It's all done with Magnets

[Retrograde]

22. That's why I keep one land line and one old-fashioned wall phone

We had a city-wide power outage a year and a half ago that lasted the entire day. The city's reverse-911 system worked for the one old phone: the new-fangled jobbies with all their bells and whistles were useless.

[MadHound]

26. Yep, same here

I live out in the country and get bad cell reception anyway. I keep a landline and old phone along with having cell. Never know what weather is going to rip through.

[nadinbrzezinski]

30. Why we have a wall phone

Wireless is useless too.

Hi neighbor!