Every year around this time we get the same question, some version of "what happens to my internet when the power goes out?" It's a fair question up here—SCE outages, snow, downed lines, all of it happens, and it happens more in the winter. Here's what we've actually built to handle it, and what you can do on your end.
What we've already built
Our core network runs on solar, battery, and generator backup. Both of our fiber uplinks—Frazier Park and Pine Mountain Club—have backup power behind them, and our Tecuya Mountain backbone runs off-grid entirely. Most of our access points carry their own solar and/or battery support, so a lot of the network can ride out a grid outage without us doing anything at all.
We also keep two separate fiber uplinks on opposite ends of the mountain. If one path goes down, we can reroute traffic wirelessly through Tecuya and out the other uplink—that's exactly what kept the Pine Mountain Club Clubhouse online during a fiber break between Frazier Park and PMC a couple summers back.
None of that makes us immune to every outage. But it's the difference between "we lose some customers for a while" and "the whole mountain goes dark," and closing that gap further is ongoing work for us every year.
What you can do
- Keep your own equipment on a battery backup (UPS) if you can. Our network staying up doesn't help if the router in your house loses power the moment SCE does.
- Know your setup. If you're not sure whether your router is on backup power, or where your equipment actually is, that's a five-minute call to us—661-242-5500—not something to figure out during a storm.
- Report outages instead of assuming. If something looks down, tell us. We can usually tell the difference between "your equipment" and "our network" in minutes, but only once we know to look.
If something does go down
We communicate during outages—planned or not. You'll hear from us that we know about it and roughly when it'll be fixed, not silence followed by a bill.
That's the deal up here: mountain terrain and mountain weather aren't going away, so neither is the work of staying ahead of them.