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[Business] Comcast Business PRI during power outage

We are looking at switching our business lines from Earthlink to Comcast (PRIs). Since we are a healthcare company, our primary concern is disaster recovery. If commercial power goes out at the node, will our phones be down as well, or is there a battery backup on the node?

Has your experience with the battery backup been positive?

Our internal system has a UPS that will run for 8 hours, so in the past we were able to operate for 8 hours. I was just wondering what to expect with Comcast.

The same is true for any service, POTs requires power on the line also and generally just have batteries at some point in the circuit.

Comcast, as any provider that provides Telco will/should have some backup abilities but it's hard to say how long that will last. That depends on the condition of the batteries, distance and number of users.

I would not assume they would work for 8 hours of no power but I wouldn't assume POTs would neither. It depends if the node and amps are in a location to have generators or not and if they have them to spare.

As a disaster recovery plan the rule would be don't lay all your eggs in one basket. Have a backup service, even if reduced number of line, via another provider some way. Be it POTs, VoIP, Mobile etc. Having 2 working lines with no power beats none.

Any companies I do networking work for that require up time like that as much as possible I have multiple internet lines. So maybe cable for primary and DSL for secondary. That gets you two DIFFERENT median types and different providers for less chance that both fail at same time. Of course the DSL will be slower but some is better vs none

Just my .0001 cents, the forum replies on this one will be good to get an idea of what questions to ask but I would definitely ask your sales representative directly and/or have a stipulation in your contract if there is need.

Thank you! We do plan to have about 10 copper lines available so we can at least forward Comcast to them if needed (providing those are up). We also have cell phones as a last resort.

We aren't as dependent on the internet, but do have some air cards available.

"POTs requires power on the line also and generally just have batteries at some point in the circuit."

During hurricane Wilma in 05 we where without power for 14 days. Cable & DSL were out for the two weeks but POTs phone worked the whole time. I'm in southeast Florida

Our cable is supposed to be on a UPS but when ever our power goes out for even a couple of minutes I lose internet even though my routers, modems and computers are on routers.

I keep a POTs line so if we get hit again I will at least have phone service

Heh, I just switched from EarthLink to a Comcast PRI two weeks ago.

In my neck of the woods the coax feeds what basically looks like a cable modem. From there it goes to another Adtran box that actually feeds the PBX. In short, there are no backup battery provisions.

No complaints so far.

Hopefully you gave EarthLink 30 days written notice. They will not disconnect your account if you don't and will be on the hook for another month's billing.

The porting process went smooth...no one really noticed and it went without a hitch.

Thanks to your post I have now remembered to try to get everything on a battery. I also have my POTS lines through Comcast so I should get the POTS breakout box on a UPS as well.

btw, here is the log file from my firewall (sentry) when a power outage struck a couple of years ago. Notice that the cable modem goes over to local addressing within a few minutes:
 

Jul 18 00:01:02 sentry uptime: 12:01AM  up 43 days, 10:37, 0 users, load averages: 0.12, 0   .09, 0.08

Jul 18 14:42:43 sentry upsmon[26088]: UPS PW5125@localhost on battery

Jul 18 14:42:48 sentry upsmon[26088]: UPS PW5125@localhost on line power

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.

Jul 18 14:50:19 sentry upsmon[26088]: UPS PW5125@localhost on line power

Jul 18 14:50:54 sentry upsmon[26088]: UPS PW5125@localhost on battery

Jul 18 14:55:23 sentry halt: halted (with powerdown) by root

Jul 18 14:55:23 sentry syslogd: exiting on signal 15

Jul 19 08:48:04 sentry syslogd: start

Is your PRI over HFC or Fiber from Comcast? We are getting enterprise level service installed and our PRI is over fiber, which only depends on the head end having power, not all the nodes (or at least that's what Comcast engineering told us)

On the POTS side there's no longer one answer. Any area that has fiber to the node will have transceivers that require power. In the area I live, we get about 60 minutes after a power outage before the CenturyLink analog lines go dark. In an area with old infrastructure (i.e. no fiber in the loop) the old adage that line-powered analog phones will continue to work may still be true.

Our Comcast business circuit lasts about 30 before the backup batteries in the nearby ped die, at which time anything running over the coax (which their PRIs do) goes dark.

yes, but like I said, this is what engineering told us. We apparently have no other equipment in our line between us and the head end that needs to be powered.

But even POTS can have amps if they run fiber from a CO to a remote box that splits there to lines in the case of VRADs and other fiber to copper Telco devices that are similar..

But even with a T-1 PRI circuit on telco's, your Smart jack is powered and needs backup...

Having had a T1 and a PRI through AT&T before (well, one of their resellers) I can tell you the smart jack is line powered, I didn't have any local power connection to it. The problem with T1/PRI are the repeaters they need which are out in the plant (I don't know if they are line powered or locally powered, I was lucky and didn't have any power outages to know if the circuit stayed up).

Our smart jack is fed by a fiber line from the Telco, so I don't think we have the 48v a copper pair would give us *lol* I think our T-1's were classified as "T-1 over fiber" from the CO, we had multiple T-1's coming in on a single strand