The Power Is Back On
…and there is great rejoicing.
I'd like to know why land-line phone service is so much more reliable than electric power. Is it because of competition? Is it because “wasteful duplication” is permitted? Is it because some of it is by EM waves?
Addendum: One of my neighbors has stronger opinions.
4 Comments:
Your landline has batteries powering it if outside power is not available. This is not practical for your electric utility.
The landline still uses wires to communicate and those wires are just as vulnerable to falling trees.
All the central offices I know are like this one:
http://g.co/maps/uufz
no overhead wires for the landlines.
Even if your landline leaves your home overhead, it will get buried pretty quick.
Note the thick black cable in the upper left coming down to the street boxes.
http://g.co/maps/pjwp
We were without power from Friday morning to late Saturday night, in north east Wisconsin. Some homes are still without power, but 'most' should be back on Monday latest.
The cause was pretty dramatic: we had ourselves a short, sharp, thunderstorm Friday morning.
Trees down all over the place - little trees, big trees, some a hundred years old, knocked down like bowling pins. It knocked lines down, destroyed electrical equipment all over the place.
I'd like to know why land-line phone service is so much more reliable than electric power
I'm going by memory here but .. landline is reliable out the wazoo as a condition of monopoly status.
So. Phone lines powered by batteries. Generators. Duplication. Backups to backups. Penalties for down service? And so on.
Bell got a monopoly, and a crap-ton of money, and made themselves the bestest and most reliable telephone network in the world.
I think the electric company .. well they didn't get a country-wide monopoly. More infrastructure to cover?
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