Is cellular affected by power cuts?

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I've never had an issue with 3G/GPRS data during power cuts, so I just assume all cell towers have backup batteries and/or generators. A colleague however tells me that they had no cellular reception in the Brooklyn area for about 45 minutes during the course of yesterday's power cuts. Is this a localized problem or is it to be expected?
 
I always also wondered about it. Most of the time it my signal was unaffected.

What I would like to know is how the hell a tower can be up for 5 hours without power and still run LTE fine on the tower. I just don't understand it. I drove to the tower and it was silent except for a few beep and 2 seconds or so but the tower was running fine with 2G,3G and LTE and the internet speeds were pretty good still.

Must be massive massive batteries because how can a tower that serves such a big area have no power for 5 hours and operate like nothing is wrong.
 
I'm not sure about batteries but I have a client that installs the radios for cellphone towers and as far as I know they also install generators at the towers. I've also never had an issue with internet access during blackouts so they must use one of the above.
 
Their is batteries, which need to be replace every some years. Batteries should last upto 4 hours, So with a 3 hour shed, no outage. But if the batteries might be too old, and lots of usage, the system may die.

Some towers do have Genny's , but they are few.
 
Cell towers get their power from everyone that's connected to it via the airwaves.. So the more users connected the better chance you have of getting a signal. Pretty much the same as a well seeded torrent.

.... :D
 
Well I'm currently sitting at a petrol station as my house is devoid of anything 2g or higher...
 
With yesterdays loadshedding, our mtn tower just lasted an hour. the next hour and half we had no signal. Once the power came on again, it toke about 15 minutes to get a signal again.
Btw, platteland here, Colesberg. :-D
 
I've been in a cell tower house and appart from a nice cool aircon there are racks of huge batteries for backup power.
If the batteries are working properly then they can give power for quite a while I'd say.
Could be that they switch from high power to lower power which could affect from 4g down to edge but that I wouldn't know.
 
There was that article a while ago about when they break in and strip the place including the lead from the batteries.
 
padjakkels said:
With yesterdays loadshedding, our mtn tower just lasted an hour. the next hour and half we had no signal. Once the power came on again, it toke about 15 minutes to get a signal again.
Btw, platteland here, Colesberg. :-D
Click to expand...

exactly the same thing happened in my area

i think the demand on the towers also spikes - huge amounts of ppl have cordless & non-standard phones, which dont work without power, thus causing more people to use mobile phones when eskom plunges us into darkness
 
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I've noticed on my tower (Telkom mobile) it drops the LTE but I still can connect via 3G. After the power was restored it took about an hour before the LTE signal came up again.
 
Maybe Jannie can help us here, seems like the towers have some sort of backup battery/generator system and they default to a less power-hungry protocol when Escom fails. The total failure that my colleague experienced was probably due to batteries that couldn't last the 2+ hours required.
 
Is cellular affected by power cuts? Indeed it is. Either the cell site will have a big diesel genny or provision will be made for rentals to be brought to the site as and when needed. *Edit* As others have testified, battery arrays can also be used by the cell operators.

See here: More on SA cell towers

Sneak peak:

MtV9C4U.jpg

Decontactor series generator plug (red).

View attachment 140948
Portable genny.

WISPs have the exact same issue and more often than not use battery arrays as they do not have the cash flow that the big cell operators have; as such, they cannot justify having a perma genny at their sites.
 
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The MTN tower dies after about 2 hours in our town.

The Vodafone tower lasts much longer, at least double or maybe even more.
 
After last night's and this morning's Joburg outage, we had no signal.

So not all towers are built the same.

I was wondering, if you don't have a landline, how do you contact someone in an emergency.
 
There are other factors that come into play. All very complex and automated. If one site goes down, another will "extend its reach". Remember that for good data transfer speeds, you need to be connected to a nearby (less than 2km) base station. For voice calls, you can be connected much further away.
 
Hemi300c said:
I've been in a cell tower house and appart from a nice cool aircon there are racks of huge batteries for backup power.
If the batteries are working properly then they can give power for quite a while I'd say.
Could be that they switch from high power to lower power which could affect from 4g down to edge but that I wouldn't know.
Click to expand...

They generally do power maintenance on those batteries every six months or so.
 
Azimuth said:
There are other factors that come into play. All very complex and automated. If one site goes down, another will "extend its reach". Remember that for good data transfer speeds, you need to be connected to a nearby (less than 2km) base station. For voice calls, you can be connected much further away.
Click to expand...

YEah its what I have noticed. Vodacom and MTN's 2G signal can travel so far. If the main tower goes down I'm sure you will at least pickup GPRS or EDGE aka 2G signal from a tower further away especially if you stay in a densely populated area. If you stay in a remote area like a farm or a area with high buildings you might not get signal as they might just have the 1 tower close by.
 
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