@greygit1 wrote:
Theory? Obviously not in the scientific sense. An hypothesis, perhaps. Or a vague hope/assumption?
I looked as best I could and didn't manage to find any definitive information as to which phone masts have back up power and which do not. There is a lot of general chatter about this, including some that state that they have battery backup systems, but a bit of quick arithmetic shows that this is very unlikely, given the relatively high power consumption of a mobile mast and the absence of very large cabinets near most of them.
Some do have backup power, but only the larger ones that have space nearby for the backup system. A battery backup that;s going to keep a mast going for more than half an hour or so is going to need a very large cabinet, larger than the small ones that seem to be adjacent to most monopole masts. The larger lattice towers often seem to have more infrastructure around their base, although whether all masts of this type have backup generators I don't know. I only discovered that the big mast that we can just about connect to has a generator because I found a planning application online referring to it.
I think it's safe to assume that the majority of mobile masts most probably don't have backup power, or at least don't have enough backup to keep going for more than half an hour or so. Not much comfort if you live in an area prone to power cuts. This year we've been pretty lucky, we've only had two or three power cuts so far, and only one of those was for longer than 8 hours, the other two were only for an hour or two. Things used to be a lot worse here, but a major power outage a couple of years or so ago (lasted a couple of days) resulted in a lot of older cables being replaced, and the newer cabling seems to be more reliable (that'll be the cue for the power to go off again soon!).
