[LINK] Battery back-up mandatory for NBN?

[Tom Worthington]

David Boxall wrote:
> On 27/10/2010 9:45 AM, Tom Worthington wrote:
>> ... Even with the need for battery backup and the number of hours
>> agreed, ...
> Has a need been established? I just don't see it. ...

My view is that the NBN is intended to replace the current telephone
service and will become even more essential to the community, so it
needs to be available when the mains power fails. I doubt the Minister, 
or the head of NBN Co, want to be summoned to appear in a Coroner's 
court to explain why saving a few dollars on batteries was worth lives lost.

The California Public Utilities Commission looked at the issue in detail 
in in Decision 08-09-014 September 4, 2008: 
<http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/published/FINAL_DECISION/87681.htm>.

The Commission looked at three options:

1. No backup requirement.
2. Four hours.
3. Eight hours.

It should be noted that this was four or eight hours of standby time, 
not talk time (that translates into about 30 minutes to one hour of talk 
time for a phone call): 
<http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/published/FINAL_DECISION/87681-04.htm>.

It was not clear to me if the commission made a decision on this, or 
what the decision was.

Following Hurricane Katrina, the US Federal Communications Commission 
determined (FCC 07-177 October 4, 2007), that telephone central offices 
  must have a minimum 24 hours backup power and cell towers for mobile 
phones eight hours. However, it is not clear if this decision survived 
appeal: 
<http://www.generonix.com/docs/FCC%20Katrina%20Panel%20FCC-07-177A1.pdf>.


> The thought of saddling our poor environment with millions of toxic
> batteries horrifies me. ...

Lead acid batteries are very easy to recycle. The NBN technician could
swap out old batteries and send them for recycling. If the battery was 
replaced by the householder, then recycling would be more difficult and 
less likely.

If the NBN was intended to be kind to the environment, then a different
design might be used, with more expensive low energy equipment and
renewable distributed energy. The MaxLinear MxL261 digital cable front 
end chip, for example, has a low power mode which can be used when less 
bandwidth is required or to save battery power: 
<http://www.marketwatch.com/story/maxlinear-enables-lowest-power-widest-rf-input-capture-bandwidth-docsis-products-with-industrys-first-2-by-100-mhz-8-channel-front-end-chip-2010-10-20?reflink=MW_news_stmp>.

The NBN could be powered entirely from distributed wind and solar power. 
On a sunny/windy day there would be more power generated than needed by 
the NBN and this could be sold into the grid. If the grid fails, there 
would be enough renewable power to run the NBN on its own indefinitely. 
But this would increase the cost of the system and complicate the design.

In "Environmental Load Reduction Effects of Ubiquitous Broadband 
Services" (2007) NTT researchers compared the CO2  emissions from 
purchasing music in a physical store with downloading it using a fibre 
to the home broadband network and a wireless network: 
<https://www.ntt-review.jp/archive/ntttechnical.php?contents=ntr200703025.pdf>.

They concluded that the most energy efficient is the wireless network 
(31 kg CO2e/year), followed by fibre to the home (108 kg CO2e/year) and 
lastly conventional physical delivery (201 kg CO2e/year). I get my Green 
IT students to examine this analysis: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/green/audit.shtml>.

This is relevant to the discussion of the NBN in Australia, which is a 
fibre to the home system. A wider analysis might show better savings for 
the fibre system, as there are energy savings tasks which could be 
performed with it, such as high resolution video replacing travel, which 
are not possible using lower speed wireless.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/