National Grid Outage: Are you ready?

[Rob_D]

At home I got a small UPS that covers my NASs and network gear, probably gives about 30 min uptime (up to about 2 hours if I spin down the NASs) some years back. Covered us for the normal, small power cuts great. Then more recently, we got a power-wall and now the UPS feels a little redundant although it does cover the networking stuff if the power-wall doesn't switch quickly enough in a power cut.

 

I guess home (and maybe business) batteries and solar would probably go further in a "national extended power-cut" as without internet and broadcasts there would be little use for the TV and computers (which are probably the bigger daytime power draws - At least they are for us).

 

[psydii]

I wonder now if our  network (even with all the PoE phones and APs)  might actually stay up longer than our ISP.  Would be interesting if @PaddyNewman or @SchoolsBroadband are able to comment on up-time commitments from their infrastructure partners.

 

TBH the original intent of this thread was so check in that people had plans in the event of a 100% tech/power failure to get the kids and colleagues safely home, and whether they had restart plans. 

 

Our critical incident plans mostly assume that we have either mobile broadband or our main internet line is available, with access to at least one of our cloud platforms. We have paper backup for contact sheets - but have not considered that in the event of a regional power failure we might only have minutes before the last-mile broadband/phone network collapsed.

[SchoolsBroadband]

This is very complicated. All of our Data Centres (of which we use some of the top ones in the country,  Telehouse etc) have resilient power  feeds, UPS and diesel generators if they individually have issues but if they whole country had an issue and there was then significant requirements in say diesel delivery over a protracted period then I suspect the government could prioritise some sites over others. Different data centres have different reserves of diesel on site already.

 

There's then also the carrier networks and how they take the data back to those data centres which will all be different.

 

The honest answer is I'm sure there will be major disruption all over the country. There are now over 100 altnets which will all have different policies on how total loss of mains power would be for them.

 

Sorry I can't be of much more help on this.

 

Dave

 

[PaddyNewman]

I'm not in a position to give the absolute correct statement so don't take my word for it, but its going to be the same as SBB above.

Our DCs are the same (in terms of redundancy/have alternative power sourcing etc) but you do have items in the middle between DC and your presentation, the national networks, peering partners, altnets, or even aggregation nodes - they have different recovery plans and may not be as resilient as a datacentre in terms of size of generator as their loads are lower on the whole but also their downtime is expected to be for maintenance or upgrades, not just full failure.. 

 

[PotNoodleTech]

I don't think it's the datacentres that you need to worry about it's the small local exchanges and mobile phone masts that are gonna let you down.

[localzuk]

6 minutes ago, PotNoodleTech said:

I don't think it's the datacentres that you need to worry about it's the small local exchanges and mobile phone masts that are gonna let you down.

It'll be the cabinets on streets too.

[pete]

I'd put new street cabs close to bus stops / other public infrastructure with a raised flat roof and have an arrangement with the council about mounting solar on top of the bus stop (high enough to deter most half-hearted unplanned vandalism) to charge the batteries.  Offer the council free broadband connectivity for bus stop display screens as part of the deal.

 

 

[Andrew_C]

In a previous thread, I was astonished to learn that the cabs have a 60A supply.  I doubt the equipment draws that much, but that's a lot of panels to get even close!

[sigma]

Our GivEnergyAIO seamlessly takes over in the event of power cuts.  Not a blip.

[psydii]

Not the answer(s) I wanted, but what I expected  Things were simpler back in the copper-from-the-GPO-or-nothing days.

 

 

[Davit2005]

Have about an hour at home on UPS. Time to get the Proxmox servers to shutdown when UPS goes low I think so a project for the weekend.

 

Work has huge diesel generators for the datacenters but use a UPS till the generator starts up as long as they kick in, lol. The new library building has a genny too. Emergency phones are analogue with digital lines which is a bit of a concern now.

Edited April 30, 2025 by Davit2005