[72663] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Surge Protection
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel Senie)
Thu Jul 22 13:07:36 2004
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2004 13:06:10 -0400
To: "Fisher, Shawn" <SFisher@Bresnan.com>
From: Daniel Senie <dts@senie.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <9DB432529DB45C41AA08F9CB2D59C4B315BFA1@glacier.bresnan-us.
bresnan.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
At 11:56 AM 7/22/2004, you wrote:
>Have anyone experienced hardware failure related to electrical spikes
>coming into your datacenters or equipment locations via the telco
>facilities? I am referring specifically to copper facilities for DS1's,
>etc. I know that the telco must maintain good grounding, but sometimes
>when you get hit with a few Gigavolts worth of electrical energy not much
>will help you. Whatever the case, has anyone had any experience good or
>otherwise with surge protection for their Telcom circuits? I am looking
>at this unit below as a possible solution.
Rule #1, don't trust the telco or the power company, or anyone else feeding
wires into your building to do a good job keeping you safe from surges.
A client of mine has what used to be a CSU/DSU... now has surface mount
components missing and the like. They hadn't installed a surge protector on
the T-1. They had covered the power and the antenna coaxes at the site.
Only the T-1 line was unprotected. Lightning will find that one path you've
not protected.
The cost of installing a surge protector is unlikely to impact your bottom
line. One successful lightning strike on the other hand will hurt quite a
bit, and probably happen at 4AM just to be more annoying.