Hacker News Reader

Comment by brightsize | Hacker News Reader

There IS an argument for it. Around a year ago we had a freak windstorm here. It was an amazing experience - took down trees and tore apart roofs all over. I'd never seen houses crushed by trees before. The power was out for days in some places, including mine. My phone battery died after a day, ditto the laptop's battery. My landline continued to function throughout.

As I recall the service was also extremely inexpensive as part of a DSL bundle. It is true that the landline was a powerful spam magnet, much more so than my cell.

View on HN

Natural disasters that cut off power for more than a few hours are unlikely in Northern Europe. Cell towers have their own emergency power supply to deal with the once in a decade brown out.

If the power is off for days it means the Apocalypse or WW3 has happened.

Just out of curiosity how do you define Northern Europe? It's a term I'm seeing more lately but I don't know what it really means.

Northern Europe refers geographically to the northern part of Europe, or in a narrower sense, to the cultural grouping of the Nordic countries, Baltic countries, and sometimes also the British Isles. (Wikipedia)

Thank you, however I wasn't looking for the Wikipedia definition. I could have easily looked that up myself. I wanted to know what the poster personally meant by the term.

It’s not that uncommon here in Canada. It’s not like it happens every winter, but it is not uncommon to have some huge snow storm or frost that leaves some people without power for days.

Just this last winter thousands in New Brunswick were left with no power in the dead of winter for over a week.

>The power was out for days in some places, including mine. My phone battery died after a day, ditto the laptop's battery. My landline continued to function throughout.

In your case PSTN was the "stable fallback" but there is nothing inherent in the technology that makes this so. Your phone stations still need power, and if they don't have backup power they'll be dead as well.

Cables have a bigger chance of breaking if they're in the air, less so if they're buried. Of course, PSTN, power and fiber can all be both in the air or buried. There's nothing inherent in any of them that make them more "resilient". So if you live in an area where your PSTN is buried and your power lines aren't, it might to lead you to conclude that PSTN is "stable", in fact there's nothing about PSTN in itself that makes it so.

In a lot of places, cell towers will have backup power as well, and so will fiber networks, and your power network might be (should be, probably) buried and better protected than your other cables.

You also have E911 with a landline that you don't get with the same accuracy/resolution with cellular service.

AFAIK, it's not super-cheap with Comcast especially as it uses a different modem than my Internet service.

One of the reasons that landlines are more of a spam magnet is that a lot of call types are exempted from the do not call list on landlines but not cell phones. There may be other reasons as well.

I charge my phone using my car's battery when the power is out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com