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Should Cell Phone Towers have Backup Power?
The FCC wants most telcos who operate cellular service to have their towers supplied with backup power sufficient for at least eight hours of service if the normal grid power goes down. Most of them are protesting the mandate, saying that it is too expensive and in a lot of circumstances, impossible, as the siting decisions already made preclude placement of heavy batteries and generators.
.."Jackie McCarthy, director of governmental affairs for PCIA _ The Wireless Infrastructure Association, said the government should allow the industry to decide how best to keep its networks running, pointing out that all the backup power in the world won't help a cell tower destroyed by wind or wildfires."....more, no immediate payback or ROI on security, there..but you find out how valuable it really is once your security plans, including backups, get used in an emergency.
ed: just *very* generally speaking, I think just about everything should have backup power. Today, electricity more or less equals civilization. You lose electricity, things start to deteriorate rapidly. Communications are just one example there. In this particular case, the telcos get *licensed* public spectrum in order to run a business from which they profit. Many other businesses in the past have had to contend with "new" regulations, that at first they resisted, saying it was impossible, too expensive and so on. Like "waah, we can't make any money unless we dump toxic chemical waste directly in the drinking water supply" or "waah, it is too hard, we can't make cars that have a fleet average fuel economy of 24 MPG" and so on. But..they somehow managed.
A mandated 8 hour backup solution would be quite the economic incentive boost to getting Large light(er)weight batteries that are both cheap, powerful-enough and *don't suck* or blow up.
In other words, I think they could figure out how to do it, and in the long run, in the next emergency, it might come in useful. And to get back to the other, 8 hours for a lot more businesses, like say gas stations, or grocery stores. Power goes out, whoops, no pumping gas or running the till or anything-right when folks need it the most. Houses in general, power goes out, no backup, stuff in the fridge starts going, no heat, no cooling, etc. All of that. Backup and decentralized power, additional points of production or storage, is a very good idea for "societal civilization security".
Look at that last big Florida power outage, one guy working on one switch messed up, poof, ton of loss of "civilization" for folks. Granted, not a Katrina scale, but an example of how critical electricity is, and the necessity for starting to get away from the massive single point of failure models, even if it costs some money "upfront" and has no apparent immediate "this quarter" return on investment.