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tbrownawtoday at 3:10 AM1 replyview on HN

Make sure you have a surge protector or ups, in case it makes the power grid go funky. Which you should have anyway.

Also, it could be a convenient excuse to upgrade to fiber internet service if you haven't already. (Yes, excuse. Equipment should have more than good enough isolation to not care.)


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johncolanduonitoday at 6:40 AM

Even if you don't have fiber all the way into your house, most cable internet terminates pretty close to the home these days. It kind of has to, since bandwidth has gone way up and as a result they can't put very many subscribers on the same termination system.

We didn't really understand this kind of thing when the Carrington event happened, so nobody knows for sure, but estimates for induced voltage on long conductors are usually something on the order of 20V/km. So for a 5 km long coaxial cable, you're only talking about ~120V of induced potential difference (i.e. the same voltage as a residential plug in the US). When people are analyzing the potential damage from this kind of electromagnetic disturbance (E3 is the term you'll see, based on analysis of nuclear EMP which has other components that you don't see in geomagnetic storms regardless of severity), it's mostly about really long conductors, like on the order of 100km.