A Verizon pointer is seen on a outward of a store in Coral Gables, Florida.(Photo: Joe Raedle, Getty Images)
Q. The Fios box in a residence is once again beeping each 15 mins given a backup battery needs to be replaced. Is there any approach to overpower that thing?
A. There is, and it’s a small counterintuitive: If we undo a battery, a Fios “battery backup unit” should stop whinging we about replacing it.
That’s “should” though not “will,” given a answer depends on a age of a Fios hardware in question, Verizon orator Harry Mitchell explained. If yours was commissioned after Mar 2013, it’s already automatic to overpower a battery-replacement alarm if we lift a battery.
With an comparison unit, Mitchell’s recommendation was to experiment: “Try pulling a battery; it won’t mistreat anything and, if a alarm goes quiet, it’s problem solved.”
I did usually that with a 2010-vintage box in a basement, and a outcome was silence.
If we get a opposite outcome and your Fios designation is as aged or as comparison as mine, we should try seeking Verizon for a deputy battery-backup unit. Mitchell pronounced Verizon will reinstate “early-generation” backup inclination during no charge.
This conditions formula from Verizon’s preference early on to safeguard that subscribers to a fiber-optic broadband use could still use corded phones for a initial several hours of a energy outage. With Fios, as with cable-based phone service, your pursuit use no longer comes over a copper handle to a nearest “central office” and so can’t get electricity from it.
To yield that haven power, Fios boxes have prolonged enclosed a battery backup section and a 12-volt lead-acid battery. A tech-support note says that this battery customarily lasts “between 2 and 4 years, depending on a normal heat of a environment.”
Ours done it by 4 years in a cool, dry dilemma of a basement, and afterwards we indispensable a day or dual to pin down a puzzling beep we kept conference each 15 minutes. Not wanting to compensate Verizon’s $39.99 list cost for a replacement, we bought a $24 battery off Amazon–which did not final a year.
Verizon has given changed divided from mandatory, costly battery backup, Mitchell said: “We have seen an upswing in business who simply do not wish to understanding with battery backup.”
It’s not usually that smartphones and tablets can let we keep communicating during a energy outage. They will also final for a lot longer than 8 hours on battery, and a wireless networks that bond them have grown distant some-more resilient–as I satisfied firsthand during 40 or so hours but energy after Hurricane Sandy.
In late 2013, a association made a battery backup section an extra-cost choice on new installs. Fios subscribers who do wish to safeguard their phone line stays on for a while in a trance now have a backup choice that doesn’t need shopping an costly lead-acid battery each few years: a $40 PowerReserve box that uses 12 customary D-cells to lend adult to 20 hours of phone use.
Tip: A broadband-finding site from a wire industry
I’ve created before about how a Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Map can offer as a severe beam to who provides high-speed Internet entrance during a sold address. But a miss of cost information kept it from earning my utter publicity even before we started anticipating cases where a map’s information did not compare what people could indeed get in their homes.
A opposite broadband-mapping site, Go2Broadband, can broach some-more accurate results–but usually for some providers. This site is run by CableLabs, a cable-industry research-and-development group, and as such it does an glorious pursuit of displaying what kind of use we can get during what cost from a obligatory wire user during any given address. It also includes cost data, nonetheless not fine-print costs like let fees for a DVR or a wire modem (you should buy your possess modem anyway).
And given this site plugs into a databases of a vital wire operators, it can even tell we what services are now active during an address. But it won’t uncover DSL or fiber-optic broadband, and some smaller wire operators don’t seem in a formula either. For example, Go2Broadband reported that a Washington, D.C., residence where RCN offers wire Internet could usually get use from Comcast.
Rob Pegoraro is a tech author formed out of Washington, D.C. To contention a tech question, e-mail Rob during rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter during twitter.com/robpegoraro.