Earlier in the week we had a call from the daughter of a long term customer whose house is on the bank of the Brisbane River to say that they had no phone or Internet. It was a couple of days after one of the big storms in Brisbane and a tree in their front garden got a direct hit. She had gone into her fathers office to do some work in preparation for his return from the US. In troubleshooting over the phone it was clear that the cable modem was dead so I suggested a call to Telstra to arrange a replacement would be a good start and I would be there as soon as possible to see what other damage had been done.
I managed to get there on Thursday and started troubleshooting. The analogue line port was blown on the radio base of the cordless phone, one of the wireless access points that was closest to the strike was blown and possibly the network switch that feeds it although it was still powered up but may not in fact be switching.
They also had problems with TV’s but that is outside our area of expertise. Possibly a distribution amp has been blown.
All of the gear is relatively new and can be replaced under warranty but it is probably worth looking at proper surge protection on the incoming Internet cable and the telephone cable to try to reduce the possibility of this happening again since this seems to be a very active storm season already. The main impact in this case is downtime rather than expensive damage or data loss.
What sort of surge protection or battery backup do you have in your office or home and what would be the effect on your business if something similar were to happen but damaged file servers or storage arrays?
