[Asterisk-biz] D-Channels Dropping During Storms?

[David Renaker]

Matt,

Been there and done that with a NEC PBX.  Hope this helps.

After 8 years of no problems we had three lightning strikes in a period of
two months.

Some things that changed before lightning season.
1. Moved to fiber sonnet.
2. Large grove of tress cleared out one mile west of building.
3. Tree line east of building cleared.

Some things done after all the experts found nothing.
1. Common ground reference for equipment.  All grounds passed testing.
2. Surge protection added incrementally from building power to end point.
3. Surge protection on Comm ports saved servers connected to PBX on future
hits.

We took hits after
1. Common ground reference.
2. Surge protection on main power feed.

No problems after
1. Surge protection on end points.

Best guess
Batteries on rectifier were dead.  ASSumed that the batteries were taking
the strikes all along.  Surge protection at the end point appeared to fix
the problem.  With in two years moved to VOIP.  Was amazed that between all
the experts there was no answer.  Utility, Bell, Lightning Consultant, etc.
The building was being hit.  The first time also melted the alarm sensors,
brooktrout card, etc.

Sincerely,
David

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 14:38:52 -0400
From: Matt <mhoppes at gmail.com>
Subject: [Asterisk-biz] D-Channels Dropping During Storms?
To: Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion
	<asterisk-biz at lists.digium.com>
Message-ID: <c11d025305060611385886efc6 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

B.S. or not?

We had a lightening storm come through our area....

I dropped the d-channel on my asterisk box... a d-channel on my Nortel
phone system.... 2 DS3's and another PRI (d-channel) on an access
server.

The phone company is saying.. well that happens during a storm.....
blah blah.... my question is.. is this B.S. or is it a fact of life? 
Anything I can do to stabelize things better?