Beat power cuts and stay online
WHILE POWER CUTS
are still relatively rare for the majority of us in cities and towns, there are still lots of ways the power you take for granted could be interrupted or cut off. In many regions of the US, such as California, earthquakes can knock out the grid for days at a time, and while there are often signals they’re about to happen, they can still strike with little warning.
There are also weather events such as storms and tornados that many areas deal with regularly and, of course, criminal damage to substations and other infrastructure. And there is always the potential for that most modern of activities, cybercrime, to threaten our critical online services. Indeed, cybercrime is predicted to remain on the rise over the coming years.
What we’re saying is that it pays to have a backup plan when such events take place, so that at worst you don’t lose any important data, and at best you can even carry on as normal if blackouts roll on for any length of time. Here’s the equipment we recommend to protect yourself to beat power cuts and stay online. –NIK RAWLINSON
1 KEEP YOUR ROUTER RUNNING
The simplest solution to staying online is to connect your router to an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). These consist of a battery that’s kept permanently charged, and a socket for your device. As long as the power keeps flowing, it passes through the UPS to the device—your router in this case— but, should the power fail, the battery takes over. How long it lasts depends on the router’s power consumption and the size of the UPS battery.
» The router’s consumption should be detailed in its documentation, on the back of the router itself, in the manual, or on the supplier’s web pages. As a baseline, many basic routers supplied by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should consume about 10W when active.
» You can divide down a UPS power capacity by this number to see how long it could support it. Amazon Basics’ UPS ($80) is a 450W device, which could power the router for about 45 minutes in a blackout. That may be enough to keep you online during an unexpected blip, but it wouldn’t keep you up and running through a longer outage or rolling blackout.
» A better, though more expensive option is Amazon Basics’ UPS 1500VA ($170), which is a 900W device, meaning it should last 90 minutes. This might be long enough to see you through if you’re careful, particularly if you can download any data you need in a short burst, then switch off while you deal with it.
2 USE YOUR PHONE’S WI-FI HOTSPOT
There’s no point connecting your router to a UPS if your internet provider has also gone down. In that scenario, you need an alternative way to get online. For occasional use, you could share your smartphone’s data connection by setting up a mobile hotspot.
» To do this on Android, swipe down from the top of the screen, swipe the shortcut buttons to the left, then tap Hotspot. If the Hotspot button isn’t shown, open Settings, type hotspot into the search box then tap ‘Hotspot and tethering’ twice. Tap ‘Wi-Fi hotspot’, then slide the switch beside ‘Use Wi-Fi hotspot’ to the right to turn it on.
» If you have an iPhone, open Settings and tap Mobile Data, followed by Personal Hotspot. Tap the slider beside ‘Allow Others to Join’ so it becomes green (see screenshot below).
» Now, whether you have an Android or iPhone, click Windows’ Wi-Fi icon on the taskbar. On Windows 10, click the name of your phone in the list to use its connection. If you’re using Windows 11, click the right side of the split button above your current network name, followed by the name of your phone.
» Alternatively, purchase a 4G or 5G router, such as the TP-Link TLMR6400 ($100), which has a slot for a regular mobile phone SIM rather than a wired broadband connection.
» If you’re only going to use this if your regular router is out of service, look for a cheap pay-asyou-go (PAYG) deal with a generous data allowance. Whichever network you choose, check that it allows tethering, the technical term for sharing your mobile connection.
3 SWITCH TO OFFLINE TOOLS
If you use online software, consider using alternatives that you can download to your computer and run from it. For example, LibreOffice can stand in for Microsoft’s online office apps when they are out of reach and is free to download from www.libreoffice.org.
» If you manage your emails using Gmail or outlook.com, you can download them using the free Thunderbird email client ( www.thunderbird.net), write all your replies while you’re still offline, and queue them to send the next time you connect.
» If you use Google Docs and Sheets, and access them through Chrome or Edge, you can set them to work offline. Start by adding the Google Docs Offline extension ( www.chrome.google.com) to your browser, then open Google Drive’s settings ( https://drive.
google.com/drive/settings). Tick the box beside ‘Create, open and edit your recent Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides files on this device while offline’. » Now return to your Google Drive account ( https://
drive.google.com), right-click on the files you want to be able to use without a connection, and click ‘Available offline’ (see screenshot above).
» Copies of these files will then be downloaded to your computer so that, even if the router fails, you will still be able to open them in your browser.