FTTC & Backup Power

Hi,

I live in a small village just outside St Ives which is due to see FTTC later this year. All my IT Kit is on UPS(s), so I can happily work for up to 2 hours in the event of a power outage, Recently we have had several outages of 50 - 90 minutes and my ADSL connection remains connected.

What happens after a move to FTTC, do BT install battery backup in each cabinet? I have heard that some cabs are powered from the echange, but these cabs will be between 2-4 miles from the exchange making this unlikely.

Clearly a move to FTTC will see me with a 10 fold increase in both upload and download over what I currently get on ADSL2+, but if I lose my connection everytime the power goes off, that may be a problem.

Hopefully someone has some experience of this.

Thanks,

Mark.

The new cabinets are mains powered, linked to the mains directly and not powered from the exchange like the existing ones. They have batteries for backup, not sure how long this lasts though in the event of an outage.

If uptime during power cuts is that important then retain a second line with exchange powered ADSL on it

how often does the power go off.

fully loaded 3-4 hours is expected
partially loaded stands at 6-12
with no load before fully commissioned they lasted a couple of days

I would have expected you to loose the connect because as people have already stated the cabs are powered by the mains without generator backup. I would think the battery back up (I wasn't 100% sure if there was any) would be meant for short loss of power, any extended outages would mean a loss of service, those cab's use a lot of power more than most UPS systems can carry for long periods.

Batteries are in the cabinets. They wouldn't put them in there for the fun of it. So one could assume that battery backup will power the kit for average +x power outages.

In reply to a post by RandomJointer:

Batteries are in the cabinets. They wouldn't put them in there for the fun of it. So one could assume that battery backup will power the kit for average +x power outages.

The batteries will need to be properly and regularly maintained. They'll be cooked to death during the summer, and frozen solid in winter.

Thanks for all the comments. I think it is safe to assume that there will be some sort of continuity of service for a typical power outage.

Aaron, can you confirm that a zen account that is configured for FTTC will still logon to a 21CN connection for backup purposes.

I designed a unit to charge sealed lead-acid batteries from a lamp-post during the night to maintain 24 hour power to a traffic monitoring site during the day.

No maintenance needed so far and over 6 years in service.

BTW, from the pictures I've seen of the cabinet (although fairly difficult to interpret), I cannot see any batteries, but perhaps it's my age and eyesight that's to blame.

Carry on charging...

In reply to a post by balami:

Thanks for all the comments. I think it is safe to assume that there will be some sort of continuity of service for a typical power outage.

Aaron, can you confirm that a zen account that is configured for FTTC will still logon to a 21CN connection for backup purposes.

It should work provided the line you log onto is a 21cn line, you would of course then be limited to the sync rate/bras of that line but you would at least be able to have your IP's in service.

Personally speaking I work for a DNO in Essex and when we attend power cuts in areas that now have FTTC we normally find Openreach engineers attending within an hour or so of us arriving to check the cabinets.

I doubt the cabinet would have battery backup. It would be expensive and still would not provide more then an hour or so's back up. I doubt there is enough room in the cabinett for large batteries and the environmental conditions would meen the batteries would be outside of there operating temperature for much of the time and may even exceed the recommended storage temperature

So in your usual manner you throw out the fact that it has been confirmed by BT employees that there is backup power in the FTTC cabs.
It is most likely to be limited capacity to get round spikes, brownouts etc since the batteries act as big capacitors. VM have installed batteries in their cabs for years. I have kit outside with batteries in far more environmentally hostile situations than the FTTC cabs and provided they are maintained properly function without a hitch.

Even TPON cabinets had battery backup

There are batteries in the cab's 4 in the mini and 6 in the normal DSLAM I think they last about 12 hours but dont quote me on this, I cant remember the exact time but they are mentr for a short period of time

I commission these cabs so I can confirm they do have batteries