A lesson from the Stanford power outage for VoIP at UCLA

You may not know it, but Stanford has been in the dark due to a power outage. Apparently, the problem won't be resolved for several days.* The power failure there raises an interesting question. UCLA has been substituting VoIP telephone service for traditional landlines. (VoIP essentially is phone service that depends on the internet.) So what happens to VoIP in an emergency situation such as a big earthquake which disrupts power service?

Yours truly poked around on Stanford's website to find an answer:

University IT (UIT) offers Cisco VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) for faculty and staff requiring telephone service... In the event of a power outage, telephone and network service in most locations should be available for approximately 20 minutes via a UPS (uninterruptible power source). It is important to know the location of an analog phone (also known as "plain old telephone service or a landline") for use in an emergency; consult your Department IT Contact if you're not sure where to find one. Depending upon the extent of the emergency, e.g., a major earthquake, cellular service may also be unavailable.

Source: https://uit.stanford.edu/service/phone/facultystaff.

The problem is that UCLA is eliminating "plain old telephone service." So, come the Big One, don't count on your office phone to work. And don't count on your cell phone. UCLA used to have an emergency low-powered AM radio station, but it seems to have gotten rid of that, too.

We have warned about both reliance on VoIP and abandoning the AM radio station in numerous past posts. Use the search engine on this blog for past posts.

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*Stanford University, the intellectual core of Silicon Valley, is struggling with something basic: electricity. Why is it taking so long? In normal times, Stanford powers its campus with 100% renewable energy — a milestone it achieved this year. Most of it is solar power. But only a small portion of the solar — less than 10%, according to Stanford civil and environmental engineering Professor Mark Jacobson — is on campus, on building roofs. The rest comes from two massive solar plants in Kern and Kings counties. Because the power is not produced right on campus, Stanford relies on the state power grid to transport the electricity. In other words, Jacobson said, there is no direct power from the solar plants to the campus. So “if there is a grid outage, the university’s going to be affected as well,” he said.

Stanford has been able to turn on some power. It’s using a few hundred diesel generators for key services, Jacobson said. PG&E has also been able to send some power to campus, though not enough for the university to fully reopen. Two transmission lines feed the campus, and PG&E said it had de-energized one due to the fire. Cal Fire is not currently permitting PG&E to access equipment near the fire where repairs are needed, the utility said on Thursday, but as soon as those restrictions are lifted workers will go in. “We understand how disruptive it is to be without power and are using every tool at our disposal to restore power as quickly as possible,” PG&E said. On Thursday night, Stanford said in its update that PG&E was “working to repair damaged equipment.” ...

Full story at: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Here-s-why-Stanford-can-t-get-its-power-back-17261627.php.