Comcast outages continue even in areas with PG&E power restored

[sean at donelan.com (Sean Donelan)]

On Fri, 11 Oct 2019, Michael Thomas wrote:
> So I knew that telcos are required to battery backup pots, but are isp's
> too? I have a dinky little provider who also provides pots, but i have never
> been clear whether dsl stays up too in a blackout.

Of course generalizing all service providers isn't fair... From my 
experience tracking telecommunication during disasters for the last 20-30 
years... Let me generalize (ignoring special goverment priority systems).


Generally, during natural (and man-made) disasters:

Telecommunication service providers historically failed in this order

1. VSAT/DTH/satellite (during weather events)
2. Cable
3. Cellular/wireless
4. Telco/Wireline
5. Broadcast radio/TV (less than 20% over-the-air stations operating)
6. Network backbone systems (inter-city and toll offices)

There are too few WISPs for reliable predictions.  I'd guess WISPs 
reliability is similar to cellular/wireless systems.


Restoration order is a bit different. Telecommunications network service 
historically recovers in this order, assuming customer premise isn't 
damaged:

1. VSAT/DTH/satellite (after weather clears)
2. Network backbone (inter-city and toll offices)
3. Cellular/wireless (COWs and COLTs deployed)
4. Broadcast radio/TV (20% over-the-air stations operating)
5. Telco/Wireline
5. Cable

Cable systems tend to be the first to fail, and the last to be restored.
Telco systems tend to fail later, but take a long time to be restored.

Network backbones can take a while to repair, but generally nothing else 
works until they are repaired, so they get repaired first or second.

Note: During even the worst catastrophes, there is almost always one or 
two broadcast radio stations still operating.  I set 20% radio/TV 
stations operating as an arbitrary minimum level.  Likewise, COWs and 
COLTs don't provide full cellular service, but do provide minimumal cell 
services.


In the last 10 years, cellular/wireless system resiliance has been 
improving while telco/wireline system resiliance has been getting 
noticablly worse.  I assume this a flywheel affect as telco companies 
have been shifting infrastructure investement to wireless networks and 
away from wireline networks for the last 20 years.