A practical, calm guide to keeping your internet up during Public Safety Power Shutoffs — backup power sizing, what we do on our end, and a simple prep checklist.
If you’ve lived here through a few summers, you know the drill. The wind picks up, the air gets that amber edge, and a PSPS notice lands in your inbox. Public Safety Power Shutoffs keep the grid from sparking a fire, but they also take your power — and, if you’re not ready, your internet with it.
The good news: keeping your connection alive through an outage is mostly about a little planning and a modest amount of backup power. This isn’t about fear. It’s about being the household that stays calm because the Wi-Fi is still up.
Why your internet drops in an outage
Here’s the thing a lot of folks miss: when the power goes out, your internet hardware goes out too, even if our network is fine. Your router needs electricity. The radio on your roof needs electricity. No power to those, no connection — same as a lamp with no bulb.
So the goal during a PSPS is simple: keep two small devices running. The radio outside and the router inside. Both sip very little power, which is what makes this so achievable.
How little power it actually takes
This is the reassuring part. A typical fixed-wireless radio and a home router together draw roughly what a single light bulb does — often in the range of 20 to 40 watts combined. You are not trying to power the house. You’re trying to power two nightlights’ worth of equipment.
That means even a modest backup can carry you for many hours, and a right-sized one can carry you through a multi-day shutoff with a daytime recharge.
Sizing your backup power
A few options, from simplest to most robust:
A small UPS (battery backup)
A desktop-style uninterruptible power supply — the kind people put behind a computer — can keep your router and radio alive for a few hours and bridges short outages without you lifting a finger. Plug both devices into it and walk away. Great as a baseline, less so for multi-day events.
A portable power station
A portable power station (a big rechargeable battery with normal outlets) is the sweet spot for fire country. A mid-size unit can run your internet gear for a full day or more, and you can top it off from a wall outlet before the shutoff or with a solar panel during the day. Quiet, fumeless, and safe to run indoors — unlike a generator.
A generator
If you already run a generator for the fridge and well pump, your internet gear is a rounding error on its load. Just make sure your router and radio are on a circuit it covers, and never run a fuel generator in an enclosed space.
The practical move for most homes: a portable power station sized to your gear, charged and ready before the season starts. Check the wattage of your specific radio and router, add them up, and pick a battery with several times that in capacity.
What we do on our end
You’re not in this alone. Our towers and key network sites carry their own backup power, so the AVISP network is built to keep running when the grid doesn’t. When a PSPS is coming, our job is to make sure the path between you and the wider internet stays lit even while neighborhoods around it go dark.
That’s part of why a local network matters in fire country. We plan for these events because we live through them too — the same wind warnings, the same shutoff maps, the same long summer.
A calm prep checklist
Do this once, before the next red-flag warning, and you’re set:
- Find the wattage of your router and radio (check the label or ask us).
- Buy or charge a backup sized to run both for at least a day.
- Plug the router and radio into the backup — and test that they actually stay on when you pull the wall plug.
- Keep the backup topped off through fire season; a battery at 30% won’t help.
- Save key phone numbers offline, including ours, in case you need to reach us.
- Know your fallback: a phone hotspot for the essentials if the outage runs long.
A quick word on smoke
Heavy smoke can nibble at any wireless signal, but a short ground link to a nearby tower has a lot less air to fight through than a path to orbit. In most shutoffs, power — not smoke — is what knocks people offline. Solve the power and you’ve solved most of it.
Before the next season
The best time to set this up is a quiet afternoon, not the night a shutoff hits. If you’re not sure what your gear draws or whether your address is well served for the long summer ahead, we’re happy to walk you through it.
Start with Check My Address, or just give us a call. We’ll help you build a setup that keeps you online and your household calm when the power blinks out.
