Telecom Service During a Disaster

Old school analogue telephone service was powered from the telco office and was almost bulletproof. When all else failed, you could go to the designated power fail phone and dial the world. These days, telephony is part of data networking so often will not work during power outages. Worse, unknown damage some distance away from you can affect your service thanks to the way providers have designed their networks.

By Peter Aggus

Peter, as an engineer & technology management consultant, has developed innovative & cost-effective solutions for clients in many industries.

Where Is the Power?

New school telephony has largely been subsumed into IT and is locally powered. You may have UPS units at your site to allow files to be saved and systems to shut down properly. You may have chosen a more productive option—a generator—and feel that you’ll be fine if you lose utility power. This is where the surprises begin.

You need to understand how you’re connected to your service provider and whether there is reliable power for every step of that route. Current Telco distribution infrastructure is often not designed for power fail operation, so you may well have IT services at your site but no Internet access and no telephony ‘dial tone’.

Fibre sounds like a safe bet as it needs no repeater power but street cabinet switches do—meaning that shared fibre feeding smaller customers is still at risk from outages. Bigger customers may also be out of luck in a power outage as there is intermediate equipment that depends on battery backup too.

Telco broadband co-ax systems are much the same—they mostly run off local street power, with batteries for some degree of backup.

Cellphone networks may seem to be reliable but again you’re faced with battery support to cover short power breaks. New base stations do not generally have generator backup.

An Example

A recent storm isolated many of the big box stores in Victoria, even though they actually had power. Phones and internet were down, caused by an up- island cable failure—meaning callers could not reach them and they could not process real-time credit card transactions.

How To Get Started

1. You need to ask questions. What services will fail if electrical power goes out? You need to talk about network architecture and service level agreements with your network providers. The answers will form part of your corporate risk register and BCP/DRP.
2. You then need to look at the consequences of lost communications and power—and then decide how your business might function under such conditions.
3. Think about how you’ll use your Cloud Services if your Internet access fails.
4. Review your business continuity plan and IT disaster recovery plan. A fast and effective way to find serious weaknesses is to conduct a ‘tabletop exercise’.
5. Each weakness needs to be added to the risk register and mitigation plans implemented.
6. The worst issues should be mitigated as a top priority.

When we work with clients to facilitate tabletop exercises the results are often surprising and distressing. We review each component of their connectivity and ask: what will happen if there’s a power failure?

What begins as a simple question: will phone service work during a power outage can turn into a useful learning exercise and make your operations more bullet-proof.

If you’d like to comment on this article or explore these ideas further, contact me at peter.