Though network powering is the heart of any network, it can get short-changed during the design and construction phase. IC asked several experts to define the good, the bad and the ugly of powering.
Power seems to be the necessary evil.
Everybody hates to think and engineer for it, but everyone knows it's a critical element in network design. Power disturbances and outages are two of the leading causes of customer-observed service interruptions. Therefore, increasing powering reliability increases overall network reliability. Without clean, safe reliable power, a communications network will not meet today's reliability requirements. This is true regardless of whether the network provides basic analogue video or the most sophisticated multi-service digital communications.