Battery backup system notes.
So, you’re wondering, what are the power supply considerations for providing battery backup to your network equipment? After investigating this, I can summarize this as follows.
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Does providing battery backup to only wired Ethernet equipment save energy compared to providing battery backup to only Wi-Fi wireless equipment? Suffice it to say, when the decision is between Ethernet and Wi-Fi, the power savings are minimal, except when Wi-Fi encryption is used, which is explained further in the next points.
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The main factor to consider when calculating power consumption is the number of computer boards being powered. When speaking of enabling or disabling functions on a single board, the power savings are minimal compared to speaking of enabling and disabling entire boards.
For this reason, not supporting Ethernet under battery backup power can save you energy if this means you do not need to supply power to as many switches. Either you have one big switch that consumes a lot of energy, or you have multiple switch boxes that together consume a lot of energy.
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For modern network equipment, the single biggest factor in the power consumption of a board is the power consumption of the computational (CPU, memory) equipment on the board. The more powerful this equipment needs to be, the more energy it must consume, and the more energy must end up being wasted as heat.
For this reason, not supporting wireless communications under battery backup power mainly saves energy if only for not requiring powering a computationally expensive encryption engine for Wi-Fi security.
If for wired communications, you only have one switch box, and your Wi-Fi support comes from a different box, not supporting Wi-Fi will save you energy.
- Finally, the board that connects to your Internet Service Provider. This may end up consuming a lot of energy to supply the needs of the telecommunications protocol. Thus, not needing to power this device can save you energy, but that means that you will not be able to access the Internet either. Suffice it to say, the power requirements of this device will be the primary determinant in what kind of battery system you will need. The rest of the network equipment on the other side is much easier to support, in terms of power consumption.
So now I’m wondering. Where do you look for a lower power cable modem?
20180812/DuckDuckGo low power internet cable modem
20180812/https://arris.secure.force.com/consumers/articles/General_FAQs/SB6183-Cable-Signal-Levels
Well, it’s inconclusive, other than the fact that your local area’s cable standards will dictate what transmit signal strength your equipment must provide.
But, for sure for the local intranet side, there’s plenty of options to reduce power consumption. Unmanaged switches can go as low as 3.3 W max power consumption.
20180812/DuckDuckGo low power ethernet switch
20180812/https://blogs.cisco.com/enterprise/reduce-switch-power-consumption-by-up-to-80
20180812/https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/unmanaged-gigabit-ethernet-switch-roundup,4321.html
20180812/DuckDuckGo TP-LINK TL-SG108 8-Port
20180812/https://www.tp-link.com/us/products/details/cat-42_TL-SG108.html
Yeah, that’s a nice power consumption and all, but we really want a switch with PoE also.
20180812/DuckDuckGo lowest power poe ethernet switch
Looking for a PoE injector? NETGEAR equipment is still the way to go, even in 2018.
20180812/https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/06/26/1529607/0/en/NETGEAR-Launches-Industry-s-First-Unmanaged-Switch-With-Flexible-Power-Over-Ethernet-Options.html
Well, as it turns out, that is much harder to come by.
So, looking at the Wikipedia Comparison of single-board computers page, I found two good ones. Discount the Intel one because I don’t want an Intel X-Y-Z for a low-power computer.
20180812/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_single-board_computers
This one looks good, though. But the caveat? PoE is achieved via a custom modification.
20180812/https://boundarydevices.com/product/nitrogen6x-board-imx6-arm-cortex-a9-sbc/
This one is too specific to routers. Otherwise, if you want a router-like device, this may be a good option.
20180812/https://mikrotik.com/product/RB450G
Okay, now what about television? That’s another pain point. Nowadays you may have one really good broadcast TV antenna on the roof but multiple televisions that would want to access that high quality signal. Or it may simply be that you have one cable TV input to the house, and the same deal that multiple televisions also want to access that. So what can you do? Well, the ideal solution is to go all IP. You route the television signals into a certain kind of server box that can then tune to multiple channels simultaneously. IP computer clients then make requests to that box to choose which channels they want to stream.
So, there are such solutions for this out here. The problem, of course, is with interoperability and standards. What is the protocol that clients use to select the channel they want to watch? Yes, the implementation is there, but the user interface is still kind of clumsy.
20180812/DuckDuckGo broadcast tv to ethernet bridge
20180812/https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-send-the-whole-cable-TV-signal-over-ethernet-Is-there-this-magical-devices-than-converts-the-signal-to-be-sent-over-an-IP-network-Can-I-buy-it-on-B-H-or-some-other-place-like-that
20180812/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elgato
But indeed, the problem is this. The fact that it is so hard to shop for and find these devices… Maybe that’s just because regardless, the devices do require some technical effort to setup, hence their lack of popularity.
Interesting other article here. People that observe that Wi-Fi “slows down over time.”
20180812/https://www.quora.com/Why-does-a-Wi-Fi-router-slow-down-over-time
Oh. and now that we’ve mentioned all of that. Another audacious goal: send a composite video signal over Ethernet so that you can access your DVDs over the IP network. Of course… it’s far more popular to rip the DVDs to hard drive storage and then access that over the network. Or even more popular, just search the Internet and hope that somebody else did the ripping for you. Alas in this most extreme case, payment methods to the producers are uncertain. In the end it is the network service provider that gets primary payments, not the content producer.