Rick or anyone else

Can anyone describe to me the relationship between telecommunications and the power grid?

If telecommunications is dependent upon the power grid, To what degree is it dependent?

If we experience blackouts and brownouts Jan. 1, 2000 and months following, will telecommunications work?

-- Anonymous, August 04, 1998

Answers

It's almost a chicken and egg thing - telcom is dependent on electricity, and electricity is dependent on telcom as a conduit for a lot of remote operations via frame relay networks and other telcom communication devices and protocols. Both need to be kept up and running.

-- Anonymous, August 05, 1998

One can see some of the concerns in the GAO's recent report on http://www.gao.gov/y2kr.htm. I am speaking about GAO/AIMD-98-212. This can be printed in full if you have Adobe Acrobat Reader (free from http://www.adobe.com), or you can order it free from 202-512-6000.

What I haven't seen much about is the dependency of utilities on GPS, and the fact many commercial grade GPS receivers have a date problem with their week-count rollover 1999-08-22. Unknown numbers of these receivers might be in our power grids, and misinterpret the date after then to be during 1980, leading to unpredictable failures (at least by me) 4 months earlier than discussed usually.

Is there something authoritative about this on your site Rick? Also, what credibility is there in Jon Huntress's SWAT team proposal on Cassandra? http://millennia-bcs.com/jonembed.htm

I would dearly like to see that approach discussed on Dr. Yardeni's webcast (at http://www.yardeni.com August 19th starting 8am Eastern), but I will be on vacation without any computers (thank God).

Thanks, tim mccully

-- Anonymous, August 06, 1998

Tim, there's a discussion thread on this board about the GPS impacts on the electric industry.

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0003Jh

-- Anonymous, August 06, 1998