MBA surfing during power outage.

[ron7624]

I guess I am a bit surprised. We lost power in my small town 30 minutes ago. Because I got tired of my ATT router rebooting at every electrical blip, I plugged it into my back up battery that I use for my desktops a few months ago.
well, this MBA is receiving wireless signals and working just as fast as always. The house is dark, but my battery operated laptop is on the web because the router is plugged into a backup battery.
I would have thought that the router would loose the wifi signal.
This is pretty cool. Just wanted to share.
I'm probably not in the right forum for this, but am typing on a maxed out 2015 MBA so I posted here.
In the past when this happened, I would connect to my iPad or iPhone for a signal if necessary, but the surfing isn't nearly as good that way.
Not sure how long this backup battery is gonna last though.

 

[Gav2k]

Think yourself lucky the tower is far enough away not to be off too lol

 

[ron7624]

Power is still out, but I'm still running.
I do live pretty close to a tower, so my iPads have been my connection in the past, but the the router to convert the signal to wifi and send it on to my laptop is something I didn't expect from the router.

 

[iP1rate]

That's pretty sweet. I'm in Louisiana and we've been getting some bad weather lately as well. Last week, we lost power and I was thinking no problem, our generator will kick on and I'll still be online. Nope. Had power but no internet. Found out a tree fell down the street and knocked down a telephone pole killing the cable line.

 

[AlliFlowers]

I keep my router and my SAT receiver plugged into ups. Never even a hiccup as the gennie kicks in.

Note to self: gennie maintenance now that we're back in hurricane season!

 

[dwig]

Here in Key West power outages are a regular occurrence. They are usually less than 15-30 minutes so keeping equipment "alive" is something a decently large UPS can do.

At work (photographer's gallery and print production studio) we have 3 UPSs that keep the sales iMac and credit card machine, my workstation and the network switch, router/AP/DSL, and stuff, and the print server and one printer alive. The UPSs are large enough to keep things up for 30-40 minutes.

At home, my wife and I have 3 UPSs. One powers her stuff (3 notebooks, a scanner, one desktop computer), another powers mine (big desktop with multiple external drives and a scanner), and the 3rd powers the DLS modem, an Ethernet switch, and the Router/AP). We get a good 20-30 minutes of network and internet connection which is good enough for our home use. Our home printers are connected to surge protectors (many via the UPS boxes) but are not on the battery backups.

 

[ron7624]

Here in Key West power outages are a regular occurrence. They are usually less than 15-30 minutes so keeping equipment "alive" is something a decently large UPS can do.

At work (photographer's gallery and print production studio) we have 3 UPSs that keep the sales iMac and credit card machine, my workstation and the network switch, router/AP/DSL, and stuff, and the print server and one printer alive. The UPSs are large enough to keep things up for 30-40 minutes.

At home, my wife and I have 3 UPSs. One powers her stuff (3 notebooks, a scanner, one desktop computer), another powers mine (big desktop with multiple external drives and a scanner), and the 3rd powers the DLS modem, an Ethernet switch, and the Router/AP). We get a good 20-30 minutes of network and internet connection which is good enough for our home use. Our home printers are connected to surge protectors (many via the UPS boxes) but are not on the battery backups.

Very cool. Because I figured this out during my last power outage, I'll probably invest in additional uninterrupted power supply devices to keep my printer and large computer alive as well.
At one point in time several years ago I had additional UPS devices but as they died they were not replaced. Mainly because I had switched jobs from working at home back to an office that I was required to go to. But now that I'm back at home working I guess I should do some shopping.

 

[Boyd01]

In my rural area, power outage and internet outages usually aren't related. My router (a 2tb Time Capsule) and AT&T Microcell are plugged into a big UPS. We had a 12 hour power outage several months ago and the internet never dropped (I switched to generator power after an hour).

Had a 5 day power outage during a big storm 3 years ago, internet connection was down for two days and then came back on. I have Verizon DSL, which is really slow but it's all I can get. It has been pretty robust over the years, but recently I have been seeing more outages (unrelated to power outages).

Last December I dropped my AT&T unlimited data plan because I never use very much since retiring. So now I can tether my computer to my iPhone 6s+ and that works great. Even though I never get better than a 2 bar LTE signal here, it's about twice as fast as my DSL connection.

 

[ron7624]

This has turned into a very interesting thread!
...and I continue to learn.

 

[mooblie]

Think yourself lucky the tower is far enough away not to be off too lol

What tower? Presumeably the router's data is going down the phone line? No towers there.

Wifi doesn't use towers. It's point-to-point between the router and MBA.

 

[Gav2k]

What tower? Presumeably the router's data is going down the phone line? No towers there.

Wifi doesn't use towers. It's point-to-point between the router and MBA.

Really depends on geographical location and provider if they use a mast to get over vast areas without cabling. Even cables have to run back to a hub of sorts that requires power.

 

[Juggar]

I had DSL in a rural area and when the power went out we fired up the generator and got Internet. And for once, the full 3 mbps since the line was severely overloaded (screw you frontier) like it usually is. Was nice to actually stream 720p netflix with no issues that day.

Have 108 mbps cable now and when the power goes out my UPS of course takes over but the cable infrastructure here certainly isnt as robust and when the power goes out, so does it. So the UPS is pointless now. Fortunately I can use my iPhone as a hotspot.

Of course, phone lines carry their own power and it would certainly make sense that DSL service remains active when the power goes out since phone lines are just low voltage power lines themselves.