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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ahda who wrote (2583)	4/22/2001 1:48:17 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

"Will the electrical shortage have an impact on many of the telcos in CA?" No, not very likely for a number of reasons. First, they have priority, both for reasons having to do with civil order and lifeline reasons, and because of political clout. Secondly, all legitimate telcos have huge refillable fuel reserves in their tanks and generation capabilities to see them through very long stretches. Having said that, this doesn't mean that everyone will be able to make phone calls with their present inventory of phones during outages. Take, for example, the prevalence of cordless units that operate in the wireless mode, requiring power. These are used throughout may homes, and could be rendered useless during power outages. It pays to have at least one good ole black desktop phone for such purposes. These don't depend on user-furnished power (e.g., ac to dc adapters), and don't require charging. Of course, regular cellular/pcs will work, and can be charged using the lighter receptacle in the family car. Businesses that use PBXes will suffer, unless they have generator backups, and/or copper lines coming from the CO that can be used as auxiliary lines during outages. This is why it's common to spec in copper facilities as a percentage of all phone services to commercial properties - as opposed to depending entirely on fiber-supported services. The latter fiber facilities require user-supplied power, whereas copper lines are powered from the CO and could be used for voice service on a criticality basis. During normal times copper lines can be used for fax or dialup purposes (modems). During power outages they double as disaster recovery assets, because they have battery on them coming from the CO. There is a slight penalty for this approach, because PBX (digital, in-house) extensions are cheaper than externally supported CO lines. One has to gage the tradeoffs of having such failover capabilities against the risk of not having any capabilities, at all.