Ernesto and VOIP - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E. , P.C.

Tropical storm Ernesto of early September 2006 is now just a distant memory, but it's a memory with a lesson.

Ernesto had lots of rain and a lot of wind, not quite of hurricane strength, but with gusts up to sixty miles per hour. Stories of fallen trees and squashed cars were all over the news. Utility power failures happened all over the place. Power here in Merrick was off for five hours.

I called the utility company when the lights quit and listened to a list of towns with outages. What a list!! It was like the whole of Nassau and Suffolk Counties had power failures.

Then my wife got a phone call from a friend who was using her cell phone because her regular phone had quit working. That regular phone used Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) but with no power, there was no internet access and thus, no phone service. Then she realized that her cell phone was low on charge and there was no way to recharge it with the power gone.

I wouldn't say that she went into panic, but some measure of alarm did set in.

Through all of this, what did keep working was our regular, old fashioned, land-line telephone service. That didn't quit even during hurricane Gloria in 1985 when that storm's eye came directly over this very block, when there was hundred miles per hour horizontal rainfall, trees falling down everywhere and even when the electric power failed and stayed off for a whole week.

What goes on here?  Why would someone deliberately risk going incommunicado in an emergency for the sake of a lower monthly phone bill? Is it for the same reason that LED traffic lights going non-visible in adverse weather (snow, ice and/or very high winds) is acceptable for the sake of a lower electricity cost?

Has anyone actually given any thought to these safety risks or is everyone blinded by the almighty dollar sign?

I guess we can't personally affect the traffic light decision, but it will be past the end of creation before this guy changes telephone service.

 

 

Comments

[Carl Schwab]

John-------I understand exactly what you are talking about and am not giving up my land line phone for the very reason you are describing. Last August 28th hurricane Irene hit LI and 5 of my neighbor’s alarm systems went berserk because the cable TV service went out and the alarm monitor system interrupted it as cut telephone connection--hence break-in.
Carl Schwab

[lee sirio]

John-I remember that outage. My wife was on the LIRR heading back to Huntington but the train got stuck due to loss of electricity somewhere on the Queens/ Nassau border. She called me on her cellphone but it died in the middle of our conversation. I had no idea where she was and had issues at the house because my son was 4 at the time and was really scared of the dark. I also had my mother in law staying with me. A real disaster. Lo and Behold my wife used a pay phone and got a hold of me on my land line (which I found an old phone and plugged it in). I picked her up a couples hurs later and had to drop off 3 other women who weren't so lucky getting in touch with their spouses.

[lee sirio]

Actually after some thought I want to correct myself- I was referring to the Northeast blackout of 2003 not Ernesto. It was not long after 911.

[Joel Koltner]

John --

The VOIP services provided by the big ISPs (e.g., Comcast, Verizon, Frontier, etc.) typically *are* battery-backed, for precisely the reasons you mention. In theory even with an "off-the-shelf" VOIP box (e.g., Ooma, Vonage) you could add your own UPS, although in many cases ISPs that don't provide phone service go completely black when the power goes out so that doesn't really help.

As for cell phones... I think the vast majority of people have car chargers? While one needs to be cognizant not to run down the car's battery too much, there's an awful lot of cell phone charges to be had from a car battery even before you run the engine for awhile to recharge it. (There are also solar chargers available, although of course few people have these.)

So I think it's safe to say that people have thought about this problem quite a bit (e.g., I believe it's some law that requires the ISPs offering VOIP to provide battery backup -- they don't do it strictly out of the goodness of their hearts). It's just of course not the sort of thing the average consumer necessarily thinks about when they're out shipping for a deal on their phone service...