A good portable generator is more than $500, and if it's a wide-spread outage there's not enough portable generators to go around, and if there were, not enough people to set them and give them their fluids. And it doesn't pay to put a natural gas (or similar) generator at every node for those rare instances where the battery does not suffice.
Frank -----Original Message----- From: William Herrin [mailto:b...@herrin.us] Sent: Friday, August 03, 2012 2:31 PM To: Seth Mattinen Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Verizon FiOS - is BGP an option? On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 8:51 AM, Seth Mattinen <se...@rollernet.us> wrote: <snip> > The central plant days are mostly gone; there's > fiber huts everywhere and not enough trucks/manpower (in my area a > lineman sits in his truck and reads a book while tethered to the power > kiosk) to run them all if the outage is too widespread for too long. They put a quarter million dollars into the fiber hut. They can't put a $500 gasoline generator in a warehouse 50 miles away and go pick it up when there's an extended outage? I'll give Verizon a little credit. They restored service after about 12 hours of outage. Cox didn't restore service until 12 hours *after* my power came back on. Could be worse. I could have Pepco instead of Dominion. But it could be better. And 20 years ago the reliability was. -Bill -- William D. Herrin ................ her...@dirtside.com b...@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
