Canada/US learnt that lesson back in 2003 with the Northeast Blackout. Generators on cell towers where not fueled and some data centre’s caught fire when the cooling went down but the systems didn’t. Lessons where learned. Cell infra is strategic and should not be allowed to go down, everything uses it and people will die if it goes down.
> Cell infra is strategic and should not be allowed to go down, everything uses it and people will die if it goes down.
> Lessons were learned.
That's why our emergency services use Rogers as the main, and Telus as a backup - but only after the multi-day Rogers outage that took out payment processors and emergency services this year.
Lessons will have been learned instead of parroted when we have a crown corporation as the main, and a private corporation as the backup. We need cell service to be reliable and rock-solid, even if it's not always cost-competitive to be so. Same reason hospitals, fire, and police services are public: turning a profit is less important than availability.
I'm in a Seattle suburb and we had a two-day blackout a few years back. Cell reception worked fine for 12 hours but then went to 1 bar. Presumably the closest cell site ran out of gas on the backup generator and my phone switched to a site outside the blackout zone.
What is wild was that this was entirely localized! A single substation affecting maybe 20,000 people. How many cell sites were affected, a dozen? And still T-Mobile couldn't manage refueling. In a country-wide crisis we would be totally boned.
Indeed! In Toronto, the cooling for 151 Front Street West was grid-powered electric pumps pulling cold water from deep in Lake Ontario... so despite all the fuel they had ready to run the systems, they couldn't use it and had to shut the building down.
