FIOS doesn t work without AC?

Like but much smaller. Just served one building.

Well, same principle, I think, though it doesn't look the same. I wasn't trained on it, but by watching it work, I think I figured it out. I think we had two-digit numbers. Pick up a phone and a one-axis rotor would step to the correct line of ten. Another would then select the first rotor out of ten. Then one or two would connect that phone to one of ten or a hundred lines to the other side, and the process in reverse would select the right destination phone.

That's right and one of the things that has changed now is moving the batteries that ran the wired telephone system from the central station to the user's property. There's no reason to be content with limited battery time or even in-house batteries though. The batteries could easily be set up to charge with a solar cell and the battery could also be put into the cabinet that services the neighborhood - also with a solar panel to charge it. FIOS and U-Verse should be pushed to do that.

Tomsic

CO's are still around; it's just the switches in them are far smaller. And they still have generators. And fuel. In the derecho in July, the CO down the road was on generator for several days.

For whatever reason, FIOS always runs to a CO, not to a DLC in the neighberhood.

You can't be forced to have FIOS for dialtone in any case I have seen; as FIOS is not regulated. An obvious example: where there is no AC power such as a building site. And while it is true the DLC has only hours of batteries, the telco has an obligation to keep it powered.

As for the ""too big a battery fable..."; it's not worth debunking again.

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rotating

Mike that is an ordinary stepper, not a Strowger

Please see:

?-)

That was what Google barfed up when i seacrched for Strowger, and I haven't seen the real thing since the mid '60s. :)

There is no "exchange" anymore, in the way there used to be these central offices with a #5 ESS or whatever. It is all moving to ATM backbone, which is essentially an internet backbone. They put RT's in the neighborhood that are hooked to a fiber, and branch out copper cable to the neighborhood. So, the switches are several hundred to a thousand or so subscriber lines, and distributed all over the landscape, instead of one building per town. If you drive around, you'll see these boxes all over the place. There are usually 3 boxes, the RT unit itself, a power entry module with an electric meter on it, and a wire cabinet.

We have Charter cable here as the only alternative to DSL (which doesn't work well in our region due to the crappy phone cables) and they have somewhere around 8 hours of batteries in each box, which serves a couple blocks. When they have an extended outage, you see them bring out a little gas generator to each pole with the Charter Pipeline box. Must be a big pain to set up all those generators.

I can't answer to FIOS, but I'm sure there have to be neighborhood concentrators, as they can't possibly run miles of fiber to EACH residence. Fiber has insane capacity, so they can concentrate traffic for hundreds of high-speed service customers onto one fiber. And, I'm sure those concentrators only have so much backup battery capacity.

Jon

No, you need power at your DSL modem/router. They will run off DC, but the voltages vary by manufacturer.

Jon