Question about cell towers and power grid

Re: Tmacmil

Hello tmacmil. Every site at least has battery backup, not every site has a generator. As long as every piece of the chain has backup power, everything should work. However, if one link fails, it all fails.

 

In most areas the carriers predominantly rely on the local phone company to provide connectivity back to their own internal networks. From the phone switch to the cell site, there is a lot of equipment that depends on AC power and battery backups. When the power goes down in a region, you'd be lucky to have good cell coverage past a day to two days. All the companies involved, the phone company, the cell phone company and the power company all have plans in place for proper recovery but the implementation of those plans can take a some time, especially when an entire region gets hit. It can take a day or two just for additional manpower to arrive, let alone the generators and maintenance people to go with them.

Also consider that during an emergency all the components in the link will be running at full capacity/demand. Quite often the battery backups aren't designed for the that load, they might be designed to support the site for eight hours but only at 75% loading. At 100%, those batteries won't last six hours.