FCC Requires Backup Power For 210K Cell Towers

1sockchuck alerts us to an article in Data Center Knowledge that explores ramifications from the FCC's decision a couple of months back to require backup power for cell sites and other parts of the telecom infrastructure. The new rule was prompted by wireless outages during Hurricane Katrina. There are more than 210,000 cell towers in the US, as well as 20,000 telecom central offices that will also need generators or batteries. Municipalities are bracing for disputes as carriers try to add generators or batteries to cell sites on rooftops or water towers. The rules will further boost demand in the market for generators, where there are already lengthy delivery backlogs for some models.

You mean they didn't before?

[dgatwood]

Yikes!

Still have a problem

[ninjapiratemonkey]

The backup generators will probably not be very effective in preventing outages during natural disasters. Consider New Orleans: how many of generators can work while submerged underwater? Or California, where should an earthquake knock out the original power to a tower, it is just as likely to knock out the generator.

This was a reason I still have a landline....

[ip_freely_2000]

During the east coast power failure a couple of years back, cell phones were useless because the towers were dead. Landlines worked just fine. I've always felt that the cell companies weren't doing enough to build out their infrastructure to support big events. They'd just have enough in place to provide average service.

Ma Bell and the landline service has been built out for generations and it shows.

Disaster response?

[brownsteve]

I am a ham radio operator and concern myself with disaster preparedness. With POTS (plain old telephone system) everyone is guaranteed their own connection, complete with line backup power so you can use the phone even if the power's out. Sometimes the switches overload and "all circuits are busy" but in most situations it's worked pretty well for the last century.

I worry about the trend to move to cell phones. We rely on both our cell phone's battery and the cell tower to stay powered. We also rely on available frequencies to use the tower. In Katrina and recently the San Diego fires, everyone immediately got on their cell phones and jammed all of the towers. Is there enough redundancy, power, and capacity to handle the next disaster? I don't think we should wait for the next hurricane to prove if cell towers can handle an emergency.

Re:You mean they didn't before?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cellphones weren't considered vital infrastructure before. And even now it is hard to argue that they can be since you can't always guarantee a usable signal in all locations (which makes it less useful to emergency responders) and since cellphone networks can easily be overwhelmed in emergencies where everybody gets on the phone at once, like during the 9/11 attacks.

At the same time, when cellphones are usable, they can be very helpful. If many of the cell towers didn't fail during Katrina, it would have been much easier to help many of the victims and coordinate the rescue in a more efficient manner.

Re:ambient power

[inKubus]

So you're saying for a worst case situation, where the batteries die, the generators are out of fuel, everything is down--and this solar panel or whatever sits there all day gathering sun and then at a predetermined time it runs the tower for 30 minutes so people can text their parents or whatever. Not bad idea, it would be extremely cheap to implement, and in the worst case scenario, it would continue to allow some communications. Coupled with fuel cell or hand-crank power for the cell phones themselves you could have a fairly reliable temporary 30 minute-per-day communication service.

Re:I am in a Outage RIGHT NOW with NO Cell Service

[Ksevio]

You're in a power outage posting to slashdot? Do you have a backup satalite link and generator just in case you lose internet for a few hours?

Re:Still have a problem

[flyingfsck]

Well duh, how many US cities are built under sea level?

New Orleans should be used as a land fill, till it is sufficiently raised to be viable again.

Re:Solar

[Anonymous Coward]

I move that in any situation where more environment friendly sources of power could be used we use the phrase 'less harmful to' instead of 'helping'. Seriously, this bugs me almost as much as companies trying to be "CO2 Neutral". Stuff we want costs energy, not just the usage of it but also the manufacturing, distribution, installation and maintenance. Now make all these solar powered.. and you're still not 'helping', you're just going for par. and that's not counting the energy costs of producing the solar cells.

Not that there's anything wrong with using solar powered cell towers. But it's in no way 'helpful' to the environment.

Re:24 hours is not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, the fools! If only they'd built it with 6001 hulls! When will they ever learn!

Re:At last

[jamesh]

Not quite as silly as you might think. In rural locations, it is quite possible that the power failure is very local (eg a possum climbed up the pole the night before and cooked a fuse (and itself)), and the power company won't know about it unless you tell them. Phoning up a neighbor is a reasonable thing to do in that case.

This used to happen all the time at my mums place. The outage would affect her and the weekend house across the road (who would most likely be away). The neighbor up the hill would be a good indicator to it being a possum induced fuse failure or something more widespread.

Ditto for a failure in your fusebox. If everyone else has power and you don't, there isn't much use calling the power company... I know most people reading this would have a tripped breaker fixed in a few seconds, but maybe your grandmother wouldn't know how to, and in fact she might still have fuse wire instead of a resettable breaker.

Even for the mail server case, a user in a remote branch who hasn't received any email all morning would probably ask if the server was down before bothering you with their specific issue. Of course a good helpdesk would put up a recorded message in that case eg 'We are currently experiencing problems with our email server, we expect the problem to be fixed in xxx minutes'.

Re:You mean they didn't before?

[SmoothTom]

In the United States that sort of priority exists for hospitals, police, fire, doctors, military, and other "essential" personnel/agencies and is called "essential service." The standard was to have three levels of "essential service" lines: initially all lines would have service, if it got really bad, only the essential service lines would be operational, and as things got even worse it would progressively shut down the lessor priority lines until only the critical public safety lines were left. (In the 30,000 line office I worked in, at worst case only one percent of the lines would be operational - "Essential Service 1A."

Coin phones were essential service: The thought there was that when Hell let out for lunch and only a few phones could be kept working, the public ones would make the most sense to keep going. Now that cellphones have all but wiped out the coin phone, they need to be kept running.

I spent a quarter century working as a tech, engineer, and eventually engineering manager in the old Bell System. Say what you will about old Ma Bell, but she did believe in backups.

The central office I worked at for about 8 years had complete battery backup for over eight hours, and twin diesels (megawatt) with a 30,000 gallon tank to provide backup power. This was an urban central office.

Everything in the Old Bell System constantly ran on battery, and the commercial power coming into the building was used to keep those batteries charged. When we lost power there wasn't even a "click" on the line, because there was no switching to backup. All that happened is the batteries were no longer being charged.

If the power remained out for thirty seconds the big diesels started up and took over charging the batteries three minutes later.

Some of our more "inaccessible" microwave towers ("Tieton" in the Cascade mountains comes to mind) had fuel for 30 days... "Just in case."

Should cell towers have backup power? Hell yes! Should the equipment huts out in the middle (or ends) of the cable runs have emergency power? Of course!

In the days when every phone was tied to a central office by a long, thin, copper wire, every phone was directly powered by the central office over that wire. Now days that just isn't so.

EVERY commercially provided communication system should have backup for commercial power such that it can hang on for at least four hours on battery, longer on a generator.

--
Tomas