Hurricane Ida and Fiber

I have EATEL fiber. There is circuitry that converts fiber into ethernet which they installed and is on a small Cyberpower UPS. My personal network wifi is on a larger Tripp-Lite UPS. Whenever I powered both of these using a generator I had wifi and Internet without issue. My assumption, right or wrong, was that the UPS would act as a filter to provide a clean source of power. Everything worked and is still working once power was restored. I guess EATEL had power or some kind of back-up to keep their end up.

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My assumption, right or wrong, was that the UPS would act as a filter to provide a clean source of power.

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Depending on which one you have, it potentially has features like these:

Surge Protection
Diverts excess voltage away from sensitive electronic equipment during an AC power surge or power spike to prevent damage.
Automatic Voltage Regulation (AVR)
AVR increases the AC power and maintains a safe voltage level without switching to battery mode and conserving battery life.
Data Line Protection
Prevents power surges that travel through coaxial and Ethernet lines from causing damage to electronics.
Line Interactive Topology
Exists when a line interactive UPS has an autotransformer that regulates low voltages (e.g., brownouts) and over voltages (e.g., spikes) without having to switch to battery.
Simulated Sine Wave Output
Provides a manufactured waveform output to supply cost-effective battery backup power for equipment that does not require sine wave output.

(From the product page of mine: LINK /)

ETA: The only potential issue with mine is that it's simulated sine instead of full sine, but I don't have anything sensitive enough hooked up to it to matter: LINK

I have ATT fiber in Madisonville. My internet went out around midnight the night of the hurricane and was back the next afternoon. I was amazed at how they were able to keep the service up with all of the damage around.

We have ATT fiber and once we got back up on generator, after a few days all of a sudden internet signal came back. We had internet back a few days before full power.

Att Fiber here. Lost it when we lost power, didn't gain it back until they added generators to the ATT box down the road.

Have a whole home generator.

Never lost AT&T fiber.

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EATEL Never lost fiber or home phone.

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Down in Houma and South Lafourche their networks took a beating.

In Houma I can report that their service was spotty for the first week after the storm. On Monday as cellular phones died their service was still up. Then it went dark on and off for periods till about Friday. It has been up ever since with few service short interruptions at the office. I wonder how AT&T worked for some. I did hear some horror stories about AT&T phone and data fiber circuits not working for some clients.

Now at my house in South Lafourche where every telephone pole needs replacing, Eatel has been down since the storm. But some of their underground network in South Lafourche is still up provided you have power on the service end. I have business fiber circuit in Golden Meadow that is still functioning.

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Honestly, Entergy and 3rd party companies restoring power has been more detrimental to fiber networks than Ida was for the vast majority of service areas. They're literally taking bolt cutters to other services to replace poles and restore power lines.

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I can agree to this. If you have been to the Houma and South Lafourche areas you can see the amount of poles that were down and would see this. Some people were even trapped by the lines in their homes as the lines blocked their driveways, and people were cutting the lines to get through. Some even made a makeshift lift out of wood or PVC to create a path to fit a car while waiting for the power companies to clear the downed poles.

One thing that phone and data companies can do better than power companies is to bury the lines. Power lines, I under stand their are technical limitations and water concerns with such high voltage lines, but fiber optics are a different animal.

After Hurricane Betsy, Latelco in South Lafourche made the decision to bury all their phone lines because they had to rebuild their network from the ground up. Latelco over time added Callais Cable to their portfolio and then became Vision Communications. They were then sold off to a variety of investment companies before being snagged by Eatel who then got snagged by RTC.

For the longest time, Vision lagged in many areas, and just started rebuilding their cable infrastructure to add Fiber to the home by adding fiber-optic lines to the existing pole-mounted cable lines.

Now they are going to have to completely rebuild again. Hopefully, they trench those fiber-optic lines.