Explain this, if you can.
Posted By Russ Emerson on November 29, 2011 at 12:04 pm
This morning at around 1:30 the power here went out, I assume due to the weather that moved through the area. I was in the middle of a round of Battlefield 3 at the time; I noticed something odd.
Less than a minute before the power went out here, I was booted from the game due to a failed connection; in other words, my internet connectivity was gone. I looked over at my cable modem and router — which are mounted on a rack within arm’s reach of me here — and saw that some of the modem lights had gone off. Seconds later, the power went out completely, and stayed off for a couple of hours. I have a pretty good battery backup, so I was able to shut down my PC normally before heading to bed.
This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed the cable “head end” going offline during a “weather event” — most of those times, our neighborhood doesn’t lose power at all.
This raises a couple of questions:
– How is it possible that my neighborhood has a more robust electricity supply than does the cable company?
– How is it that *I* have better backup capability than does a public utility?
This doesn’t bode well for civilization surviving a zombie apocalypse.