[TriLUG] OT: Home Security without the phone line?

[Pete Soper via TriLUG]

Those who were around for the fun time named hurricane Fran may recall 
it was the big wake up call to the cell carriers that generators to 
carry their towers through extended outages were a good idea. Don't know 
if they made permanent improvements or not, but there was a fairly 
drastic set of symptoms during that adventure. Of course at the 
beginning the system was completely overwhelmed by calls, but after days 
that wasn't the basic problem, then it got better as generators were 
lashed up. Or at least that was the situation were I was (Wake county, 
outside Apex).

If you can hack your cell phone to support a security service, great. 
But cellular modems have their own collection of issues. No free lunch. 
If you go that route I suggest staying on the center line in the middle 
of the road by copy-catting a system with an excellent track record. 
Perhaps something from Adafruit or SparkFun with a real community of 
users to help get over any bumps in the road if there are some. Avoid 
magical thinking about signal strength, antennas, the value of a 
relatively or completely unobstructed view of the tower, and above all 
else, Mr Lightning.

-Pete


On 12/7/20 10:01 AM, Bill Weinel via TriLUG wrote:
>
> All local AT&T switching offices have large battery banks which can 
> run their systems for days with no utility power. They also have 
> generators in order to charge the batteries... which is why the POTS 
> phone system stays up even during widespread power outages. Most ISPs 
> don't invest in the same amount of power infrastructure to keep their 
> services up during an extended power outage. If you're using telephone 
> service for alarm or security purposes, the best bet is to use POTS 
> telephone service. Otherwise, for VOIP phone service, the next best 
> thing is to use a cellular phone service since most cell sites are 
> generator powered during a widespread power outage.
>
>
> cheers,
>
> bill
>
>
> On 12/7/20 1:35 AM, Jeremy Portzer via TriLUG wrote:
>> Phone companies know that people rely on their service for alarms and 
>> other critical services, hence they have a lot of infrastructure to 
>> provide backup power to their COs and switching stations.  Over the 
>> years many people report that their phone service stays up during 
>> ice/snow storms and hurricanes when nearly every other utility fails.