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To be fair, if you experience blackouts that often your infrastructure is probably prepared for it. Most of Europe basically never has blackouts, so why spend m
by crote 4y ago
To be fair, if you experience blackouts that often your infrastructure is probably prepared for it.
Most of Europe basically never has blackouts, so why spend money on backup batteries when they will be deprecated before they'll even be used once?
- beached_whale 4y agoCanada/US learnt that lesson back in 2003 with the Northeast Blackout. Generators on cell towers where not fueled and some data centre’s caught fire when the cooling went down but the systems didn’t. Lessons where learned. Cell infra is strategic and should not be allowed to go down, everything uses it and people will die if it goes down.
- sbierwagen 4y agoI'm in a Seattle suburb and we had a two-day blackout a few years back. Cell reception worked fine for 12 hours but then went to 1 bar. Presumably the closest cell site ran out of gas on the backup generator and my phone switched to a site outside the blackout zone. What is wild was that this was entirely localized! A single substation affecting maybe 20,000 people. How many cell sites were affected, a dozen? And still T-Mobile couldn't manage refueling. In a country-wide crisis we would be totally boned.
- thanatos519 4y agoIndeed! In Toronto, the cooling for 151 Front Street West was grid-powered electric pumps pulling cold water from deep in Lake Ontario... so despite all the fuel they had ready to run the systems, they couldn't use it and had to shut the building down.
- beached_whale 4y agoi heard stories of cabinet fires that day on front.
- 29083011397778 4y ago> Cell infra is strategic and should not be allowed to go down, everything uses it and people will die if it goes down. > Lessons were learned. That's why our emergency services use Rogers as the main, and Telus as a backup - but only after the multi-day Rogers outage that took out payment processors and emergency services this year. Lessons will have been learned instead of parroted when we have a crown corporation as the main, and a private corporation as the backup. We need cell service to be reliable and rock-solid, even if it's not always cost-competitive to be so. Same reason hospitals, fire, and police services are public: turning a profit is less important than availability.
- fomine3 4y agoJapan too (except natural disaster) but most cellular towers have backup power source like battery or generator.