Time Warner Cable - Legacy → [Internet] backup modem with Time Warner

That's why I have one set of routers connected to both FIOS and TWC at the same time, with route diversity.

Plus a back haul point-to-point link to the Google building, at 111 8th Avenue. (I have line of sight).
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But seriously, when working on an emergency preparedness/disaster recovery (home) plan, you need to conduct a single-point-of-failure analysis to flesh out the likely failures that you want to protect against. And I know this painfully well.

-nony

Addicted to the internet much? I work from home and if my internet goes out I'll just go into the office...

Hey if you are running a business from home, that is actually a sound business investment. The backup account doesn't have to be fast. I know people who run their business from home, have TWC as their main internet, and the cheapest form of DSL or U-Verse (usually 3 Mbps or something) as a secondary ISP, running over a secondary, independent line and network. Sure, it costs them $35 a month extra (or whatever the cheapest U-Verse or DSL plan costs nowadays) but as a business sending out that ONE email can be the difference of getting an order or not. And 3 Mbps is good enough to run email and such through so you can continue to stay in touch with your customers.

Heck these days you don't even need that, mobile hotspot on your cell phone.

If you are home-bound, and rely upon medical telemetry you are not going to any office. But your point is well taken. Maybe you can live with an outage if you have acceptable recourse.

-nony

The medical telemetry I've been around all uses the cellular networks for communication back to the home office.

Good for you!

And good luck next super-storm.

You might want to consider that the op has asked about a sensible, cost-effective, and fault-tolerant solution.

-nony

Exactly, so why did you bring up medical telemetry? OP just wanted to know about a backup modem. Not fault tolerance....

And I'm betting that during super storm Sandy fault tolerance wouldn't have meant shit if you lived up in that area...

In my particular area, we lost power for over a week, but my phone service never went down.

Never give up your pots line!

-nony

In the past medical telemetry equipment just hooked up to a phone line and dials out every so often and/or dials out in an emergency. (e.g Home Dialysis) More recently I have seen stuff with built in cellular devices for communication so you can actually go be outside and still wear your monitor.

In any case, Internet access is a necessity for modern life, certainly for those like me who do not subscribe to television anymore and get virtually all entertainment on-screen by means of internet. But it isn't a "life or death" situation. As others have mentioned, if I really really needed internet, i'll set my phone as a wifi access point, and just limit traffic to web browsing and email. It seems that people have forgotten what life was like before we had internet. And an outage isn't really an outage anymore these days with everyone having smart phones that connect to the internet.

Where my apartment and office was in Manhattan (several miles apart), we lost power, POTS, cable, DSL, fiber, cellular, you name it, for quite some time. In fact, in various parts of the the city, they never fixed the ancient POTS and simply told customers they could switch to fiber or another solution for voice.

How could you have lost your POTS connection? We are talking straight copper from your premises to your serving telco central office (which in my case is the 18th St. co).

Do you really have a pots line terminated with a dumb phone which requires no external power?

-nony

During our last major storm of ice in 2002, I was without utility power for a week. 36 hours in to the power outage and my POTS line went dead. It didn't come back for nearly 3 days after power was restored in my area.

IIRC there was a lot of under ground flooding that damaged a lot of equipment when Sandy came through.

In my location, which is virtually served because we are too far from the CO, our phones will be out within a day if the power doesn't come back up in the area. DSL will be down right away. Verizon has to bring a generator out to the remote terminal to keep it powered up. In some cases, they don't end up doing that at all.

Our cell towers also behave similarly. They will fall to EDGE or 1X service after about 6 hours without power.

Salt water does not mix well with any sort of wires/equipment. Sandy was a real bitch.

In the event of a sustained power outage, only your pots lines will remain operational. In my high rise, all my FIOS/TWC voip subs lost their land line phone service within minutes after the East 14th Street substation explosion. Everyone with copper continued to have service.

Two of our Manhattan CO's took a hit-

140 West St. Central Office 1-day outage (hardened after 9/11)
104 Broad St. Central Office 11-day outage (should be hardened by now)

»www.nyc.gov/html/sirr/do ··· gles.pdf
See A Tale of Two Central Offices p.167 in the above doc

-nony

Yeah SO long as the POTS lines are not damaged, which happened to ALOT of people during Sandy and VZ said FU get wireless or whatever... We aren't fixin it.

Edit: And that left DSL subs screwed since they used the same POTS lines...

The modem came. I put it on a splitter and called TWC through my other modem. When I finished talking to the robot, I noticed that the DS, US, and Online lights on the new modem had gone from flashing amber to green. The Link light was out. As I had no backup phone, the lady said she'd call back in a few minutes to see if I was ready to deactivate the old modem.

I connected the new modem to my ATA and got flashing amber on the link. When I bypassed the ATA and connected directly to my computer, it turned green. It seemed the modem was incompatible with my ATA and I didn't know why.

Then I found that nothing would work with my old modem although the lights said it was online. I discovered that my computer would work with my new modem, through the ATA, although the link light was flashing amber. That allowed me to download the modem manual. The flashing amber meant merely that the ATA was 10/100 Base T Ethernet.

TWC is fedexing me me a box to return my old modem at no cost.

You're lucky. I don't have any other broadband services that compete. I uses EarthLink's dial-up on the copper wire (no DSL for being over 19,500 feet to CO).

I know people who didn't have a POTS phone line for 3 months after Katrina hit. And no, they didn't live near New Orleans or the coast in general, but about 2 hours inland. The damage from Katrina was so widespread the telephone companies just didn't have enough time to fix it all.

As a matter of fact, the mobile masts were up and running a lot sooner, as 1 mast covered e.g. a 5 mile radius, and it was easier to just put a generator near it and get communications back up in an area.

The same people by the way did not have electricity for 4 weeks. That was a higher priority to get back up and running then phone lines I would think.

Glad to hear you got it going.

I would STRONGLY advise you to take a ride to the local TWC office (Shelby?) and turn it in and get a receipt that you can hold on too.

Things have a way of getting lost in the mail.

Just save the tracking #...

Been there, done that...

When I signed up for Uverse, I backed out because they still hadn't fixed my phone line a week after installation. When I went to mail the modem back, I discovered that AT&T had removed the return labels from the backing pape. I phoned, and they sent me new labels.

Six months later, they sent me a bill for the modem, claiming I hadn't returned it. I was able to go online and find proof that they'd received it in Dallas. If I'd flown down there to deliver it, I probably would have misplaced the darned receipt!