Herewith another badly written article leaving you to draw your own conclusions…EXPLAINER | Why a 'major incident' in Zambia affected SA's power supply | Fin24
so i know my batteries I’m using was “dead/uncharged” for a long period, as they were in a UPS that was faulty… Also my use case of this 1000Watt UPS is to cover the load of my Switches etc, while the Victron fails over… just giving the network equipment a better environment, so the UPS is not carrying load for hour/2/3… it’s like sub minute… Except when my Victron shut down like the other evening… well in that circumstance having the UPS living for longer would just have postponed the shut down anyhow.
My case, I’m using old batteries, I need to replace them, as best/financial/benefit as possible, which is 2 x cheap Lead Acids.
G
The lines themselves aren’t owned by the ISP, but you can’t control over whether the fibre provider (Vumatel, OpenServe etc.) has backup power. However, even if they have but your ISP don’t, then you would not have internet access. So that is why I say you can control for which ISP you choose, and as such should choose one with good backup.
While that’s true, you do have more of a customer voice with fibre than with LTE.
One of our fibre lines is on Frogfoot and it would go down about 40mins before loadshedding ended, leaving everone milling about during that time. A few calls to the ISP got escalated and FF replaced the batteries. Line is even more stable now, so presumably something else got fixed in the process.
Took about 3 weeks to get escalated, then 2 weeks to fix, so by no means fast, but it worked. Key is to continue calling after loadshedding is suspended. 
Switching ISPs is trivial… In the past I migrated a semi-broken ADSL line to Afrihost for the sole purpose of getting their support and escalation team into my Telkom battle. Worked great. With fibre it’s even easier.
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I don’t consider mobile data networks are in the same league as fibre. There’s hardly a comparison IMHO
Am I missing something??
Hah! I know people who did that solely to get their new ISP to deal with the cancellation of the Telkom account! 
I think people expect “comms” to continue, regardless of technology.
So fibre is certainly in a different league, but you don’t expect mobile to get even worse during LS. Surely they design for that? Apparently not.
During LS we immediately lose LTE, switching to 3G, but in practise only voice works, no data. I certainly did not expect that.
If they design for that, I suspect your network costs will have to be much higher. And where do they stop designing for it? Do they have to end up building mini power stations at each of their towers?
That question is answered through the free market - how much people are willing to pay for “talk-time” or “mobile data” etc. And then with that money, and the amount of profits that their shareholders are requiring for the capital provided, they try to design a network that is better than those of their competitors in the locations that they saw a gap in the market. At the end of the day, if all functions well, we get what we pay for.
Indeed! But they don’t factor in the hidden costs. I reckon the mobile operators have been hammered with the cost of batteries being stolen from their towers. They were planned for originally but not to be replaced a few times a year. So they simply don’t have batteries in their towers any more.
The fibre operators appear to be able to install their valuable infrastructure in more secure locations (eg. schools) so you can expect better network availability from them.
Or at least less remote locations. Yeah unfortunately the batteries being stolen is a reality. As such, I don’t get angry at the cellphone providers, but I also don’t rely on them during loadshedding.
More “accurate” reporting on the matter …
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One that hits me is the fibre, works 100% when the power goes off, however when they turn the power back the connection just hangs sometimes. I read that its because everyone reconnects at the same time causing the disruption, anywhere from 2min to 20min sometimes not at all
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I remember on ADSL, the authentication servers got overloaded when everyone tried to log on at the same time (because of the way authentication was redirected based on what ISP you were with), but if you were already connected at the time, your connection would remain up.
I would expect that for fibre the same would be true, since the carrier protocols are pretty similar.
Funny enough, here in Benoni on Openserve Fibre, I’ve never had the line go down even during 8 hour grid issues. Clearly Telkom has a significant backup solution in place.