Does your house have an Optical Network Terminal in the Garage or Basement near the Hydro panel? if you lose Hydro, yes its great to have a battery backup for your modem but if the optical network terminal loses power, what are you going to do to provide power to it during a power outage?
Here's the situation. You can have all the battery or generator backup you want at your home, but if the power goes out in your area, it can affect the service provider (Bell or Rogers, or other) node that's feeding all the customers in your area (typically a few hundred). These nodes used to have battery backup, however, the batteries are very expensive and are rarely replaced. They are also sometimes stolen and not replaced. This is true for TV, Internet and Home Phone fed by a cable to your home.
So, even for POTS (twisted pair) service which used to stay up all the time, if the power goes out in your area, then you are going to lose all those services. POTS now runs off the same optical backbone to the node and will go down if the node goes down. It's the luck of the draw as to whether your node will stay up, but you can probably assume that it will not.
The only option for phone is to have a cellular phone, which may or may not work if the power failure affects the cell tower, or if there is massive congestion/overload due to many people using it at the same time.
I have UPS on all my electronics and if there was an area power failure, I had no service of any kind - TV, Internet, Home Phone, since about 5-7 years ago, which is when I assume the battery in the (Rogers) node died.
Of course, if the power failure only affects your home (like a tree that comes down on the electricity line to your house) and not the node, then the backup power will allow you to still have TV, Internet, Home Phone (if applicable). Obviously the line feeding TV, Internet, Home Phone needs to remain unaffected, which would probably be pretty rare.
The Rogers gateway will not boot completely without a signal, but you will be able to see the orange light flashing if you have power. 😉
Edit: PS. With legacy digital cable, I believe that cable TV may have stayed operational, depending on how widespread the power failure was. I could continue to record on my NextBox 9865 for a while since it was on a UPS. However if the power failure was widespread affecting the Head End, I believe everything went down. Of course, now with IgniteTV the recordings are in the cloud and are recorded even during most power failures. If the servers were affected, obviously there would be an issue. The one thing that legacy allowed was that you could watch your recorded programmes from the NextBox (if you had power), even if the cable and internet were down, like last July. This you cannot do on IgniteTV.
@nothappy11 As far as I know, Rogers has never provided any assurance that their HFC (or any neighbourhood) infrastructure would remain online in the event of a power failure. When Rogers offered their legacy Home Phone service, their voice modem had battery backup, as did the fibre nodes serving the neighbourhood. (They did this to be more competitive with Bell, whose lines provided battery and dial tone from the central office.) As a result, if you had backup power in your home, your legacy cable and Internet would still work if your fibre node had battery backup and remained online. When Rogers stopped selling legacy Home Phone, they also stopped servicing the batteries in the local nodes. Even if you had remained on legacy Digital TV, you still would have lost your TV service in that last power outage.
Bell modems are built differently than rogers, Bell was offering a backup battery in some of their modems, while the vendor that Rogers uses does not offer such features. Bell may also have a power backup solution to power their outdoor infrastructure, while rogers infrastructure may not have sufficient back up system in place or not available yet.
Even if you can get your modem to stay on during a power outage with a backup UPS, for the internet to continue working, the entire network segment from your modem all the way to the central office or head end must also have continuous battery backup solution in place, even if one point of connection in that path loses power, your connection will not be happening. so its a lot of work to provide a backup power during a hydro outage
@nothappy11 wrote:
so basically what you are saying is bell has a better system in place for dealing with power outages and internet lines.
I don't believe that any one of us said that. What we said is that regardless of what you do at your home, you are relying on the service provider's infrastructure to have (battery or other) backup installed in their equipment that feeds your neighbourhood. In the old days, you could rely on them having battery backup, but today you cannot. There is no significant difference between Bell and Rogers in this regard. If the battery in the node feeding your neighbourhood (Rogers or Bell) is not functioning, then you're out of luck.
Most Rogers and Bell customers are now being fed by Fibre to the Node (FTTN) and some have Fibre to the home (FTTH). There are very few customers that have twisted pair from the CO, which would function under a power failure if the CO has backup (the old POTS). Twisted pair has very limited bandwidth of only 50-100 Mbps if FTTN and only about 5-7Mbps if directly connected to the CO.
No one provider is superior to others. The fact of the matter is, Hydro outages are a fact of life, they happen., We should not get caught up on who is better during a hydro outage, remember that big blackout of 2003? yeah imagine if everyone complained about not being able to make calls during a huge outage like that? that is unrealistic.
If you have a UPS to power your telephony equipment during a power outage, then you have already done as much as you possibly can, if the provider still does not work during hydro outage, sorry to say not much else you can do except call and let them know however they do not guarantee uptime during hydro outage, its written into their SLA
By the way, alarm systems also require a working battery backup. the old traditional alarm systems would make a call to the monitoring station during an alarm. but there is no way to know if the monitoring station is working during a hydro outage
@nothappy11 wrote:
Right now our alarm is on bell and with every short power outage we have had the bell modem has rebooted
Then you should consider yourself lucky, but as @Pauly mentioned, no provider is superior in this regard.
As for alarm systems, it may be a better option to go with a cellular connection because cords are easily cut by burglars and I'm not sure if they are particularly active during brief power failures. 😉\
@nothappy11 wrote:
When bell installed their modem for my phone they said as long as there is power (in your home?) your phone line will work
What they say and what actually happens can often be different regardless of the provider.
Bell used to supply batteries with their internet modem, they do not do this anymore, Can you take a guess why?
I used to have a bell landline years ago, during an Ice storm, yeah my phone Did in fact work for a few hours during the power outage, but guess what? it also stopped working the next day when the central office or node powering it ran out of batteries.
@nothappy11 wrote:
well so far Bell fibe modem worked ( and has worked ) during a power outage with generator backup, your ignite didn't on the very first outage
I don't believe you are getting the points we are making.
1. You're lucky that you have phone and/or internet service at your home in a small area power failure because the battery in the node serving your area is still working. This could stop at any time and people in a different Bell service area would not have the same result if their node battery is dead or missing. My Ignite would have worked if the node in my area had a working battery because I have my electronics on a UPS.
2. You are but one anecdotal data point and you cannot generalize from that one anecdotal point.
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