Back when the huge shocking thing that felt like the end of the world was Australia on fire, it turns out telcos held up all right

Back in January when Australia was on fire and the rest of the world wasn’t, locals in the burning zones were advised that the best source of information was emergency services apps. But they were unavailable because mobile networks had gone down. And now we know why: a new report titled “Impacts of the 2019-20 bushfires on …

[Cuddles]

Something confused?

"report says reliance on electricity isn't a resilience issue"

Quote from the report:

"This indicates that reliance on mains power does affect network resiliency."

Is there a missing "not" there?

[W.S.Gosset]

Re: Something confused?

Freudian slip.

[W.S.Gosset]

Oops

"Amusingly", one of the BIG fires in NSW was started by a substation which had been cabled up incorrectly. The electricians had physically connected the wrong wires in the cable to the wrong wires in the substation.

Add lots of load as the nearby network has lots of bits melt, and.... BOOM!

[Henry Wertz 1]

Will generators help?

Would more generators help? I have Verizon Wireless here in the US, which does brag about having generators on their sites, and the few times power went out here it worked.

But, I can't help but think of what I read about a carrier in NW Iowa here (probably bought up and absorbed by AT&T or someone by now), they bought and installed generators on every site, awesome. The first test of this? Ice storm. Knocked out power to almost every site simultaneously (100+ sites), plus iced up the roads -- when gravel road properly ices over, you can get up to about 10MPH before there's significant risk of sliding off the road into the ditch. Since these are all rural sites, they had 2 or 3 people planned to refuel sites, apparently got someone to ONE site to refuel it before the power ran out on their 100+ sites. So they had some few hours of use, then no service anyway. Apparently after THAT, they went ahead and removed the generators and sold them to another cell co.

I see this situation in Australia as analogous -- having service stay up is awesome. But service would have stayed up for some few extra hours, then been down for days or weeks (no access to refuel the sites) anyway.

[DocNo]

Re: Will generators help?

Local power generation from reliable power sources is the issue - not local power generation in general. There’s lots of promising work with micro nuclear reactors; it could be progressing a lot more quickly if we weren't so phobic about nuclear power.