Hello!
I wanted to create this post to see if I can get an answer, as google seems to give mixed results. This winter, I was thinking of getting a small generator incase our power goes out. We live in a rural area, so I have propane for heat, but was more worried about keeping devices charged and some lights.
I was curious if we had a power outage, if I powered my modem- would I still be able to have internet access? We have Xfinity but I wasn’t sure if there is a total power outage, if the internet would go down either until the local system is brought back up or if it had batteries/self generators so the network stays up during an outage.
I live in N GA and this last summer, we had a storm that took out power for two days.
We have AT&T fiber Internet service.
I had a portable generator running, principally, so we didn’t lose our refrigerated and frozen food. It also powered the fiber modem, the Internet modem, my router, Wi-Fi A.P. and everything critical in my home office. The Internet worked just fine…but we were lucky. The same storm took out a lot of infrastructure that provides comm to our area. AT&T fiber was not affected (presumably because it is largely in the ground).
I was in the middle of that storm and yes ATT worked once they repaired the fiber, but Xfinity was mostly out for much longer. They even put their generators in our neighborhood to power their amplifiers.
Since I think most cable providers now provide phone over cable, they are generally pretty good about having service in an outage for the purpose of emergency services. And many of the combined data/voice modems they offer have battery backup options as well specifically for this purpose.