What Preppers Should Know About The Communications Network.

Uh....no.

 

Had "Doc pickin" splinters out of my fore arms once..

 

Ah for the good ole' days....

 

The Gaffs are what is different , My set has 3" spurs , that is so I can get a good bite into the wood trunk through the bark . If Im climbing a old Fir & it has huge bark , Ill use the saw to shave off the bark as a planner on the way up , down we use the repel rope or swing to another tree . My service pole spurs are just shy of 2 " and are straight . Using these makes me feel my age now.
Sloth

 

Right, and using service pole spurs while hunting deer has hurt more than a few, when they fail, while used on trees.

 

Linemen keep the lights and landlines running in all seasons .

 

Not at my place unless they can stretch them two miles.. What would the line loss be on a two mile extention cord??

 

My point was that is not something that would be done by me.. If I was pressed to put in power up to my place it would be done by those that know how .. It is cost prohibitive for me to do such a thing and I would not want to be so dependent on the commercial grid...

 

I've always been puzzled by HVDC transmission lines: ISTM that the costs of conversion would outweigh any advantage of using DC.

But, talking about comms and prepping, what does it take to run a amateur transceiver off a solar array? I have a typical "low bands" unit that puts out 100 watts on transmit, and it runs off a car battery: I'd like to have a solar array that could keep it going, i.e., keep the battery charged and ready for maybe an hour of use per day.

How much would it cost? What are the trade-offs?

William Warren

 

Thanks for the "bump"!

Since my original post about six months ago, AT&T has announced Project 2020. You can google it for the boring details, but the quickie version is that dumping switched networks is no longer some conceptual idea on telecomm's wish list...it is real and it is actually happening...and fast.

As you read this all the telecomms are tearing out switches. The central office I work in is going to lose half of its 5ESS by the end of the year. The office in the next town over already shut down most of its Nortel DMS-100. This is going on all over the country.

Meanwhile, all the big telcos are adding cell towers and beefing up their optical networks. When I started in this business I turned up maybe one optical circuit per month, and that was in a large office. Now, I'm doing about one every single day, and a lot of them are going into tiny, rural outposts that until recently were little more than glorified switchboards.

I must clarify that most of the media coverage is claiming that the large telcos "want to dump landlines". That's not exactly true. Your wired home phone will still work. It just won't be on a switch. As good preppers, we should never take the media at face value.

Prepper takeaway: As the public communications system becomes a purely routed network, and legendary-reliable switched networks are sent to the junk heap, having a communications plan that includes more than one mode of communication is imperative. Ham radio is an absolute must.

That brings me to Tevin's Law, which I "invented" a long time ago (you can google it too): "Ham radio is so essential to prepping that, without it, one cannot really say they are prepped. It is second only to water and equal to guns."

 

It won't turned into a "purely routed" network: I doubt it could. AFAICT, there will still be central offices and switches: they'll just be in fewer places and will have a lot more lines assigned to each one of them.

However, it's a difference that makes no difference: there won't be any "central" office in most of the places where they used to be: most likely, Ma Bell will put a "CEV" (Controlled Environment Vault) under the sidewalk where the Central Office used to be, and will stick a few racks of fiber terminals and a "switch" frame in there, and the fiber line to the "real" central office will handle the rest.

Since the Enhanced-911 system depends on the "old world" signalling and types of connections, and since E911 has allowed incredible economies in the design, deployment, and (above all) staffing of First-responder dispatch centers, I think the wire from your home will still go to a miniature switch in the CEV I mentioned.

After that, I don't know. Although the ILEC (Imbedded Local Exchange Carrier) in each area might want to enjoy the economies of VoIP-based trunks, they don't want to lose their most important cash cow: the business customers who are still largely tied to "virtual circuit", one-line-per-call types of technology (this is, of course, oversimplified). If the ILECs allow the business users' service to deteriorate, then their customers start picking up their phones and calling congressmen, and the last thing the big three want is congressional (or any) governmental oversight.

Residential users, however, are in a different situation, and I think the ATM-based fiber networks will be used for business voice traffic during the day, and then will be switched over to carry various kinds of media during primetime, with home telephones relegated to either VoIP or some other time-sharing technology. In other words, while I doubt business users will notice much of a change, residential customers are going to be given more and more reason to switch to - you guessed it -cellular, which has pay-per-minute pricing and is the wet dream of every oligopolist in every ILEC headquarters.

FWIW. YMMV.

William Warren

 

I'm not sure where you get your information about the telecomm industry, but I'm sorry, you're really off the map. I don't even know where to go with this.

I will address one of your points: 911 does not "depend(s) on the "old world" signalling and types of connections." A lot of 911 does in fact still use old technology, but not because it "has" to. Legacy equipment is still out there because they just haven't gotten around to converting yet. I assure you, we're working on it. "Old World" carrier systems, such as D5 and those ridiculous Tellabs analog bridge circuits (that no one with less than 40 years seniority knows how to work on), are disappearing faster than phone switches. Where is all that traffic going? Onto a routed network. Duh.

Anyway, keeping it related to prepping: My purpose was was to explain the weak points in the public communications network, bust a few myths, and stress that it's important to have your own "redundant system" that does not depend on a complex infrastructure...ie, ham radio.

This probably isn't the place to dive deep into telecomm policy and technology, but I may pick this topic up on my blog, Twenty First Summer | Thoughtful. Positive. Relevant.

 

I think we're both saying the same thing, although with different words.

The PSAPs (Public Safety Access Points), where the E911 dispatchers work, are still using (believe it or not) MF signalling in some cases. SS7 is a relatively new technology in the public-safety arena, let alone SIP or VoIP, and that part of the PSTN will change only as municipalities choose to allocate funds that are needed elsewhere in a down economy.

The definition of "routed" networks depends on perspective: an ATM switch is, technically, a part of a "routed" network, so you've got me there if that's what you're referring to. It's no surprise that D5 banks are being MD'd, since most central offices have DS3 or higher-speed interfaces to the various DACS connection points. Come to think of it, a DACS could be considered a kind of router, although it doesn't change its routes in real-time, but the D-1, D-2, D-3, and D-4 banks of my youth were very labor intensive, and so they were destined for the PMR bin long before D-5 came along. We agree, I think, that automatic, high-capacity devices have replaced the individually wired channel units or copper pair trunks in most areas.

The question, though, is which "network" we're discussing: I think we can agree that the PSTN is "routed" in the sense that it's dependent on OC-192 and OC-768 "trunk" lines between extremely high-speed "routers". That's not the point I was making, though: for this discussion, I equate "routed networks" with the Internet, and I don't think the ILECs are willing to alienate their business customers by using VoIP as their core MAC layer in the PSTN.

While I agree that residential uses will find themselves taking a back seat when the Internet-based content providers start paying for priority treatment (NetFlix has already made a deal with Comcast), I doubt that "busy hour" traffic will be "routed" through the Internet anytime soon. Time, of course, may prove me wrong.

Here again, we're in agreement on one point: the PSTN has never been as robust as we all like to think, and it will never be designed to serve a "Mothers Day" load, or even the "mass call events" caused by the "be the tenth caller" contests that radio stations run. It's just not feasible to do so, and that's why radio stations are all given special "contest" numbers, which have a limited selection of routes available so as to not overload tandem or local switches.

I know that the mayor of my town enjoys priority dial tone, and I know I don't. I know that the cellular network can't survive more than a day or two without commercial power, that most fiber-to-the-curb networks will go dark before that, and that those-in-high-places have codes which will get their calls through when mine are blocked. Those are facts of life.

We disagree, however, on Amateur Radio: it is complex only when it's users choose to make it so, and I believe it will be a more viable choice for preppers than CB, MURS, or other "party line" kinds of communications, which will be just as jammed as the PSTN should "the" balloon go up. Hams are in a position to construct and maintain hardened networks right now, and all they require is the will to do so.