Topic 'Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?' in forum 'Comcast HSI' - dslreports.com

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 12:17:57 EDT

jmich posted : no, its the scumbag criminal's fault. Is he a relative of yours?

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 11:00:01 EDT

telcodad posted :

Comcast has battery backups along each part of their network. The next device after your house is the HFC node on the pole/strand. It is powered by a battery backup box that usually says "Alpha" on it. Each hop/device after that is also on battery backup.

When the power goes out the system should stay up for a while when it is on battery (but not indefinitely). It should not go down immediately.
:
Note, you need to have your equipment on a UPS for it to function during a power outage. Most cable modems that don't have voice don't have a built in battery backup.

Yeah, I noticed those car-battery-sized boxes appearing on some utility poles around my area several years ago.

I find that when the one side of my development loses power (but I don't), my cable services work for about 2 hours more before they fail, so the node for my home must be powered on that side.

The power was restored to that side of the development last night, but my cable services have not come back yet. I called Comcast and they said they know about the outage in my area, and that it is rated as a "Level 4" on a scale of 5 (with 5 being the worst).

So it may be a while before I get TV/HSI service restored at home. :(

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 08:24:34 EDT

camper posted :

said by flwpwr :

All this whining is great but it the OP has a house amp and his house looses power, his house amp looses it in which case, it will pass no RF incoming and he will be DOA. Just saying. ...

While you make a good point about the house amp, there's no house amp in my house. Just a passive cable run from the pole to my modem. Yet I still lost internet access within a couple of minutes of the power going out.

Just saying...

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 12:48:49 EDT

anon posted : All this whining is great but it the OP has a house amp and his house looses power, his house amp looses it in which case, it will pass no RF incoming and he will be DOA. Just saying. If the backup power does not power the feed to the amp too, it will go dead and your screwed.

You can test this by just throwing your main breaker, if you lose internet, you probably have an active device on your local network somewhere, a lot of smart panels have them hidden inside. That or you have the stuff plugged into the surge side only of the battery back up. If your service stays on then its place power outside that is the issue. Or you have really bad timing and turned your house power off while the power went out.

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:21:20 EDT

gar187er posted : so its comcasts fault that a person cut the lock and stole their generator; which is more the sufficient to power a section of your system?
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I'm better than you!

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 17:04:02 EDT

jmich posted : comcrap tried strapping consumer generators to poles and this is how it worked out here. Fios install scheduled here for 11/17. Had no power for 7 days here and neighbors fios stayed up on generator at his house. Pitiful.

»manchester-nj.patch.com/articles···enerator

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 15:48:35 EDT

bemis posted : I appreciate the replies everyone. It seems hit or miss.

A friend of mine reminded me that back in Feb 2009 I helped him connect a generator to his house, an ice storm knocked out power for 20 miles or so around him. We were pleasantly surprised to see his Comcast service up and running, in fact it kept running for the entire 4 days he was on generator.

So I guess it has to do with the local setup. In my case, based on what happened during Sandy, I'm anticipating that power loss = internet loss for me.

Switching back to FIOS is not a pleasant option because they want $30/mo more than Comcast. I have an iPhone, but AT&T will not allow tethering with their goPhone plans. It looks like tablets offer tethering, but the monthly costs seem high, if you don't already have an account they want not only the cost of the minimum data plan (~$30/mo) but also some sort of "line access" costs, so you end up nearly $50/mo just for stand-alone cell access...

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 15:01:32 EDT

dan1431 posted : According to my Uncle who lives in NJ and was slammed by SANDY, his COMCAST internet stayed up for approx 8 hours after he lost power to his house.

As he has a generator he had power and was able to surf the net and watch TV until he said all of a sudden the signal went out.

When the power from the power company was restored so was his internet and TV.

Clearly COMCAST has some sort of backup power system, but even it has its limits.

I know that in FL COMCAST does have a generator at its head end (it is a fairly sizeable unit) and when the last major hurricane came through FL, they did bring in generators to power the system as the battery backup system eventually ran out of juice before FPL could restore power.

Dan

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:09:55 EDT

camper posted :

said by bemis:

I was surprised to find today that after the neighborhood lost power, I immediately lost Comcast HSI service (despite of course having backup power for my modem/router).

With VZ FIOS the HSI service would stay running for many hours after neighborhood power outages...

Is this typical for Comcast? Does the HSI fail immediately with power loss? Or was this a unique thing?...

It has been typical for me since I switched to Comcast HSI.

Here's a typical log excerpt from my firewall log, showing the log records from the UPS monitoring software and my dynamic DNS script. Note that within two minutes after the power goes off, the cable modem has switched over to a private network address. That switch may have occurred sooner than two minutes, as I scan the IP address every ten minutes.

 Jul 18 14:48:38 sentry upsmon[26088]: UPS PW5125@localhost on battery Jul 18 14:50:01 sentry dyndns[3575]: IP addr on rl0 is 192.168.100.10, running locally.

Back when I had DSL, I would retain internet access for the full eight hours until my UPS died.

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 12:53:42 EDT

EG posted :

said by sportal:

The next device after your house is the HFC node on the pole/strand.

FWIW, not necessarily. There may also be other line actives like amps / line extenders between the node device and the customer premises.

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 12:34:51 EDT

tshirt posted : And the battery in eMTA's power the voice only during outages the internet/modem side will not be powered (put your modem on the UPS it only draws 9 watts max.

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 11:47:54 EDT

sportal posted : Comcast has battery backups along each part of their network. The next device after your house is the HFC node on the pole/strand. It is powered by a battery backup box that usually says "Alpha" on it. Each hop/device after that is also on battery backup.

When the power goes out the system should stay up for a while when it is on battery (but not indefinitely). It should not go down immediately.

I had the problem where my service would go do immediately during a power outage. I contact Comcast, described the problem, had it escalated, and they sent out the engineers to test the battery backups at each point and replaced the one that had failed and gone bad.

I recommend contacting Comcast and having them determine which battery backup is failed/gone bad.

Note, you need to have your equipment on a UPS for it to function during a power outage. Most cable modems that don't have voice don't have a built in battery backup.

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 23:14:37 EDT

Alcohol posted : I have power but Comcast is still down. They don't know what's wrong. They won't give an eta
--
I found the key to success but somebody changed the lock.

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 19:42:13 EDT

SeaSeaTee5 posted : There is AC power on the mainlines, generated by power supplies which are connected to commercial power. Like other posters have said, there are battery backups at each power supply, in the event that commercial power goes out but sometimes they do fail. Normally there are a couple of hours of standby. Enough to get a generator deployed in normal circumstances.

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 19:26:23 EDT

bemis posted : The funny thing is that the Comcast started as the backup... it proved reliable (with power up) and VZ FIOS raised their rate on me to where it was double the Comcast rate, so I decided to just stick it out w/ one provider.

Having the network up and running is critical to me doing my work, but doing my work is not critical... but I'd like to be able to handle different situations--a downed pole or set of lines will equally affect VZ FIOS or Comcast, so in that scenario my weak link is cables, nothing I can do there except go wireless. I guess for some reason I expected Comcast network to continue to operate during a power failure just like POTS and FIOS has done... I thought they supplied voltage to their nodes along the lines using DC power on the hardlines or something, but I guess not.

More than likely my backup from now on will be a cellular connection. I used Sprint 3G as the backup for years, worked fantastically... dumped it because it was $60/mo and I very rarely used it.

My situation is the equivalent of a town manager deciding to lay off firefighters because there haven't been any fires... I relied on not needing it, and when I needed it, there was no reserve.

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 19:14:33 EDT

beachintech posted : There are a lot of areas that rely on comcast or other cable co's to run verizons tower fiber connections over their networks.

Comcast won't send a tech out with a generator in a storm like this, so if its important you have to have backups.
--
Ex-Tech at the Beach.
I speak for myself, not my former employer.

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:58:47 EDT

ExoticFish posted : I agree. Verizon is far more likely to have their cell towers up and running before Comcast gets a backup generator to run their network.
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»www.VAJeeps.com

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:46:21 EDT

beachintech posted : If an internet connection is that important for work, I would suggest having a backup connection. My 4GLTE phone from verizon works great with a free hotspot app.
--
Ex-Tech at the Beach.
I speak for myself, not my former employer.

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:43:56 EDT

bemis posted : Thanks for the replies guys. I'll just chock this up to hurricane weirdness...

I haven't had a power failure since getting comcast... where I use this for work, this could be a bigger issue. I've always been able to keep going through multi-hour outages w/ FIOS.

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:35:57 EDT

gar187er posted : no, unless the power supply has has a failure.

see post:

»Re: Storm Comng - What Backup DOes CC Have for Voice?
--
I'm better than you!

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:27:28 EDT

bemis posted :

said by beachintech:

Well, if the pole holding your local power supply is taken out, along with power service, your service goes down.

There are a lot of battery backup points required depending on plant design. You have no idea what took out the power and what they had to do to restore it.

Yeah, I mean I agree w/ what you're saying--when the outage was occurring I just assumed a pole was down... but when the power was restored, connectivity was restored immediately too...

I'm just wondering if this is typical--power failure = comcast service failure?

Re: [Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:24:22 EDT

beachintech posted : Well, if the pole holding your local power supply is taken out, along with power service, your service goes down.

There are a lot of battery backup points required depending on plant design. You have no idea what took out the power and what they had to do to restore it.

It's a hurricane, stuff happens. Your area hasn't even seen the worst of it yet.
--
Ex-Tech at the Beach.
I speak for myself, not my former employer.

[Connectivity] lose power, lose service?

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:17:45 EDT

bemis posted : I was surprised to find today that after the neighborhood lost power, I immediately lost Comcast HSI service (despite of course having backup power for my modem/router).

With VZ FIOS the HSI service would stay running for many hours after neighborhood power outages...

Is this typical for Comcast? Does the HSI fail immediately with power loss? Or was this a unique thing?

BTW--I know the outage is tied to power because connectivity went down immediately with power, and restored immediately when the power came back on.