VM Service availability when local power cut ?

Hi - I have installed local UPS devices on my equipment and VM Modem/Router but when there is a local power cut, I lose VM even though my equipment stays powered.

Is this normal ? I would have assumed the local VM street distribution equipment would also be UPS powered ?

Thanks.

I think it depends on your area, and whom built the original network. We are lucky not to have many power cuts here, but I think it is normal. Not many VM cabinets are powered, the really large ones here make a lot of noise and I assume have the fibre to coax convertors.

ok thanks for the reply - that's a little disappointing.

I agree it's rare to have power cuts in the UK, but we've had a few lately and for home working I have to rely on 4G which is not good.

Would FTTC services also go down during a local power cut - as I may investigate that as a secondary connection ?

In reply to a post by teeerex:

Would FTTC services also go down during a local power cut - as I may investigate that as a secondary connection ?

I think they have batteries in the cabinets, not sure how long they last. Our 4G services collapsed during the last power cut, as the local mast went off, and the distant masts were overloaded.

I drove to Starbucks, but that was 2018, so pre the pandemic.

The MSAN's / fiber nodes (the bigger VM cabs) have a battery backup.

Normal cabinets do not.

BT FTTC cabinets have a battery backup.

Edited by wolvesmad (Tue 01-Sep-20 12:11:16)

Nearly all the cabinets are powered however I do not think the coaxial network has battery backup.

VDSL2 cabinet should run for 8 hours on batteries and they can swap them out to replace with charged ones if outage is longer (takes 10 to 15 minutes)

In my experience, the FTTC batteries lasted 6 hours in my cabinet. I only know that because the road the cab was in suffered a power cut, but my road was unaffected.

6-8 hours is typical which covers the the vast majority of power outages

In reply to a post by broadbandjockey:

In my experience, the FTTC batteries lasted 6 hours in my cabinet. I only know that because the road the cab was in suffered a power cut, but my road was unaffected.

The length of time the batteries last depends on the number of active ports on the DSLAM and the condition of the batteries.
8 hours is a good average but in reality it can range from 4-12 hours.
I'm sure someone will be along to report their cabinet died within an hour or 2 but that's definitely not the norm.

During a big power outage in Leicester a few years ago there was a user on kitz reporting losing sync for 10 minutes every 8 hours over 3-4 days.
It was the DSLAM running on batteries and those batteries being changed every 8 hours.

That's pretty decent imo, especially compared with backup power options on various other networks.

Edited by j0hn83 (Wed 02-Sep-20 16:30:14)

I think this thread is more about the powering of the local cabinet.

However what I've noticed is when I have something trip in my house which takes the VM Hub (modem mode) offline, it can take hours 1-12 hours to resync and connect. I think this might be because my local area has high utilisation.

It got so bad, I called the engineers out and they replaced the connectors coming through the wall and changed the attenuator as I'm quite close to the cabinet.

I haven't had the sockets trip in the house since, so hopefully will resync quickly if it does. However I wanted to mention this related point.

In reply to a post by ringzer:

I think this thread is more about the powering of the local cabinet.

However what I've noticed is when I have something trip in my house which takes the VM Hub (modem mode) offline, it can take hours 1-12 hours to resync and connect. I think this might be because my local area has high utilisation.

It got so bad, I called the engineers out and they replaced the connectors coming through the wall and changed the attenuator as I'm quite close to the cabinet.

I haven't had the sockets trip in the house since, so hopefully will resync quickly if it does. However I wanted to mention this related point.

I'd agree that something isn't right there. I used to find that a resync on Virgin Media only less than 1 minute on both a Superhub 2 and 3, certainly much quicker than FTTC.

In reply to a post by gary333:

I'd agree that something isn't right there. I used to find that a resync on Virgin Media only less than 1 minute on both a Superhub 2 and 3, certainly much quicker than FTTC.

A power off / on on my Hub 3 takes about 2 minutes to reconnect.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by gary333:

I'd agree that something isn't right there. I used to find that a resync on Virgin Media only less than 1 minute on both a Superhub 2 and 3, certainly much quicker than FTTC.

A power off / on on my Hub 3 takes about 2 minutes to reconnect.

Yours is slow . 5GHZ Wifi could take over 1 minute to be visible again, however anything LAN for me was up and running very quickly and certainly less than a minute. Maybe it depends on how old / quick the equipment is in the various cabinets

As it turns out I had high latency just now so restarted the router. I was back online within a minute or two, so the engineers fixed it.