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[Business] Shouldn't Comcast HSI stay up during power out?

Whenever the power goes out, my Comcast business internet does as well. All my local equipment is on a UPS, yet the modem loses sync as soon as the power goes out and only comes back shortly after power is restored.

I figure Comcast *should* have battery backups for their equipment, especially since they offer phone service as well and provide battery-backed modems for that purpose.

In my area, it has been my experience that when the power goes out, cable does too.

But the landline phones stay up. We had working phones during a 5 day power outage during hurricane Wilma.

I think that whether or not your local HSI service (including CDV) is actually protected by a battery backup system is entirely dependent on the practices of your local franchise.

I know that my area used to immediately lose all cable service during any power outage (or during electrical storm activity even when there was no apparent power outage for anything other than Comcast cable services). However, shortly after Comcast started providing CDV in this area a few years ago, they upgraded their infrastructure to include battery backup. Since I signed up for Comcast Business Class service in March, 2011 I have not had a problem with my HSI going down during power outages or electrical storm activity (although we have not had any outages lasting more than an hour or two, so I don't know how a long term outage would be handled).
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This has been discussed many times actually. In general there should be battery backup systems at the node and further down the coax trunk - the actual number of power supplies in a given node segment depends on how large of an area that particular node covers.

These power supplies are very similar to the UPS you use on your own equipment except that they put out DC power (they're a rectifier not an inverter). These power supplies will always be there and the rectifier will be working all the time (the node and remaining actives on the plant would be down otherwise).

The battery backup side of the power supply is another matter. The power supply can work without the batteries, it just won't remain online if the mains supply goes down for any reason. These batteries are nothing more than 12V gel cell batteries (roughly group 31 size) in a (generally) 36V or 48V string and there may be more than one string connected in parallel.

Like any other batteries, they don't last forever, these even less so than a CO battery. There ARE maintenance programs for the power supplies (I myself have worked as a Comcast sub-contractor in 2004-2005 on such a maintenance program), though whether the program is active in your system is another matter entirely and one I can't answer.

Basically what I'm getting at is the batteries should be maintained but may not be. Given how many of these threads I see and how many mention they don't maintain ANY service in an outage would lean towards them having cancelled most if not all of the maintenance programs but that's just a guess/assumption.

Beyond the batteries, some power supplies have a natural gas generator either as an integrated solution or a standalone setup. The downside is EVERY power supply needs a generator for the entire node to be operational. If just the node power supply is generator backed, only those taps from the node up to the next power supply will be online once the batteries die.

The batteries are worth lots of money at the scrap yard. People are making a living going around stealing them. They had a article in the paper here and a picture of a van where the guy got over 40 batteries on one given saturday.

our experience has been that we have HSI and cable tv for about 6-7 hours of an outage (as of last year where we had 3 major outages)... we have a generator for the house and have to stream tv through our laptop using a wireless hotspot on our phones (you use a good percentage of your bandwidth cap in about 2-3 days of that!)

They're similar. They're 12V gel cell batteries that are approximately the same size as a group 31 car battery. I wish I hadn't lost all of my old pictures or I could show you many examples of what the insides of different Comcast power supplies look like.

And yeah, think about it like your generic UPS. Whether home grade or enterprise grade, 3 maybe 5 years is all you get out of them before they are seriously reduced in capacity or outright dead.

What Rody says is a good consideration too. I hadn't considered their theft value. There are locks on the power supplies that range from essentially cabinet locks to higher end multi-tumbler locks but when has a lock ever stopped a determined thief? Locks only keep honest people honest no matter how good/expensive the lock is.

Raise a ticket with support

though maybe you don't have CDV for those that do I think there might be some clause about 911 and power.
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Put a lock and an case open sensor, then if its stolen at least they'd know.

I'd want a full enviro monitor there too so if it gets flooded or frozen someone would know.
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They'll know something is up. Part of the maintenance checks I did on the power supplies in Atlanta was installing a DOCSIS based monitoring device. It connects to the rectifier to monitor it and connects to up to two 48v strings with monitoring points at 12/24/36/48v. Of course if the batteries are already dead and they haven't done anything about it, unless they disturb anything else in the cabinet zero is still zero on the monitoring system lol.