5 ms·
Well, I dunno. When I worked at the Telco that serves all of Northern Canada - the telco that has the largest operating area of any telco in the world, in fact
by grecy 9y ago
Well, I dunno.
When I worked at the Telco that serves all of Northern Canada - the telco that has the largest operating area of any telco in the world, in fact - we had an outage that took out everything for between 1 and 3 days.
When I say everything, I mean if you picked up your phone you didn't get a dial tone. Or cell phone. Or internet. Even people that still have 2-way radios to use as phones were out of luck.
There is no other provider for every single one of those customers, so not a single person had a single shred of connectivity.
In the larger cities they posted Police and EMT Personnel on street corners in case people needed 911.
That was a rather big outage, caused by a backup generator not starting during a power outage. We were still trying to bring systems back online a week later that had never been shutdown in 20+ years.
- avs733 9y agoThis type of stuff is terrifying to me. When these incidents occur, people freak out and get angry and demand action...for a while. Then it gets forgotten about. As I've gotten older I've started to separate process driven organizations from progress driven organizations. Process driven ones tend to be very boring, and it can be abused, but good processes trump progress to me everyday.
- abandonliberty 9y ago>Then it gets forgotten about. Then consumers don't want to pay for it and action ceases. You can play those odds for quite a while.
- avs733 9y agounfortunately. I forgot where I read it, but there was a story/quote/interview about how politicians can never run on maintenance because maintenance isn't sexy, they need to run on big projects.
- occams_chainsaw 9y ago> Even people that still have 2-way radios to use as phones were out of luck How would a telecom outage impact two-way radios?
- NateyJay 9y agoTwo way radios can often connect to the telephone network through a bridge at the radio repeater
- grecy 9y agoWhat he said
- moftz 9y agoThere are systems used by first responders that allow for radio basestations to be connected to landlines to run to other basestations. This allows you to create more coverage area for your network. The radios run a trunked system that is more like how cellphones work than how something like CB radios work. This is why things like ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service) is important for disasters where centralized systems aren't working but long range, simplex (decentralized) nets can still operate.
- exikyut 9y agoI have an ancient book on Private Mobile Radio. It has a section on using leased lines in it
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- walrus01 9y agoBy population the entire area served by northwestel is smaller than a single rural wa state county, however.