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Comment by rambambram | Hacker News Reader

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rambambram·

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Telcos have tons of backup power. They’re required to have it.

Mobile internet still works.

Cell towers have backup generators?

Most of them have batteries. How long they last depends, in my country they can typically manage 4 hours.

They still need other infrastructure to get anywhere though (routers and other networking infrastructure).

Cell towers have batteries and/or generators, with fibre connections to data centres, which also generally have batteries and/or generators.

Always picture someone with a big can of diesel filling up a generator. Experience says it could be a genny running on natural gas. Had that at work before.

I think cell phone towers use surprisingly little energy, just a few kW. So even longer term operation should be possible withs bobs backyard generator running on vodka.

But I would guess the whole network equipment would draw quite a bit, especially a modern infrastructure.

Batteries at least.

We had a (much smaller) regional (Lübeck and Ostholstein) power outage here in Northern Germany in I think 2018 or 19. No mobile internet until everything was restored ~6 hours later, and most of the time no other cell service either.

"Cell towers have backup generators?"

All essential infrastructure has to. Heck, if you have a landline you can probably siphon off some power from the DC component.

It works, but only some of the time now. It’s been very unstable for me since the outage started. I’m in Spain.

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