The Internet and broadband society needs a new form of power distribution

Nearly all aspects of public and commercial life depend on electrical power and telecommunications. Internet technology will become the means by which critical communication services, e.g. telephony, 112, etc. are distributed. The customers of broadband services will get telephony over IP at low extra cost and will not pay for the old telephony service any more. Gradually, all buildings that are fully broadband connected will be disconnected from the old fixed line telephone network. This means that the availability and reliability of the Internet access must be dramatically improved. IP technology requires high electric power locally at every active point in the access network, including the IP telephone. Telecommunications and the Internet are most likely to fail us when we need them the most, during a power cut. It would be a maintenance logistic, an operating and environmental nightmare to try to provide each and every one of the billions of electronic devices that make up the Internet with small batteries that can last for 8 hours, which is the target of the telephone network. It is therefore clear that the mains electricity network, needs an upgrade of integral reserve power supply for the powering of Internet and other critical systems. This upgrade to the power distribution network could be rapidly implemented by using power cables made to the same dimensions as optical fibre cables. Power cables can be natural conveyers of optical fibre making up hybrid optical power metropolitan area networks. An estimate of the operational reliability of such a system would suggest that this new power would be unavailable for less than 15 sec/year, which is the target for power supply of telecommunications. This paper will suggests a solution of this challenge and proposes a new power distribution system with integral reserve power.