We’ve touched in past articles about the advantages of our fiber internet over competitors’ wireless internet. One of the biggest advantages is there’s no ‘rain fade’ that causes disruptions of service during our crazy monsoon storms. That’s not even counting for the big dust storms (aka ‘haboobs’) that we often get in the desert.
Often times when we have these weather changes, we also have power outages. Power outages are another major disruption of service. If you work from home, you might welcome a power outage as a forced break from the day’s activities. Or maybe it’s something you dread – especially when you know there’s that 1PM conference call with the big boss or that important client.
With our fiber internet, you no longer have to worry about service disruptions even from power outages. Wait, what? How is that possible?
It’s possibly been explained to you during your install appointment that you can add a battery backup to plug in your fiber gateway and router and maintain connection throughout a power outage. Or at the very least, it will prevent equipment from power cycling every time there’s a blip in the power. For example, I’m going to use one of the router recommendations on our signup page, our gateway, and an inexpensive battery – Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) – to demonstrate how much run time you may get during an outage.
Our Gateway – Max 7 Watts of Power
TPLink AX1800 Deco : ~$60 – Max 13.2 Watts of Power
Typical laptop – 100 Watts of Power (We will use this in a second calculation below)
Here’s a couple different UPS Battery backups and how long they should run our Gateway and Wifi Router, and if you added a laptop computer to the battery, in the event of an outage:
| UPS | Runtime of Internet Only | Runtime of Internet + Laptop |
| APC UPS Battery Backup & Surge Protector, BE600M1 – $80 | 1 hour, 27 minutes | 26 minutes |
| Amazon Basics Standby UPS 600VA 360W – $60 | 45 minutes | 10 minutes |
| APC Battery Backup Surge Protector, BX850M – $149 | 1 hour | 23 minutes |
All of this is made possible because our network rack is fully redundant. All equipment that connects your gateway to the internet – routers & switches – have redundant power supplies, 2 layers of battery backup (Enough to power everything for 36 hours), and gas generators on standby.
So next time it rains, you don’t have to worry about a power outage taking you offline. You can keep on working, scrolling facebook, or whatever you use the internet for. Just don’t forget to reset your microwave and oven clocks…