Sandy Brings IP Transition Issues to Forefront as Verizon Replaces Copper with Fiber

As a result of the subterranean flooding in New York City, Verizon is “dealing in real time” with the overall industry transition to an all-IP network, said Tom Tauke, executive vice president-public affairs, policy and communications. When the copper “sits in salt water a few days, there isn’t much left,” he told us. In the six months before Sandy, Verizon had placed 68,000 aerial fiber drops, a spokesman said. In less than two weeks since the combination nor'easter and hurricane blew through, Verizon has purchased 50,000 aerial fiber drop lines, and is using them to reconnect homes and businesses to Verizon’s all-fiber network. Since Sandy, the company said it’s used more than 14 million feet of wire, compared to just over 2 million in an average month.

When Verizon’s Tom Maguire surveyed the damage after the superstorm hit the Northeast, he saw firsthand the effect sea water could have on copper. When power went out at one central office, air compressors keeping pressure on the cable also went out, and the senior vice president of national operations went down into a manhole outside the central office and popped off a splice case to try to dry the cable out. “We were taking on water left and right,” said Maguire. “The copper was exposed to water all over the place.” As Maguire walked toward the beach on the south shore of Long Island, he saw that the Federal Emergency Management Agency set up tents with medical facilities. Into that field hospital, technicians were stringing fiber to provide data and video feeds. Maguire saw that despite the fiber being soaked, it still worked. “To me, that kind of drove home the point,” he said.

As Verizon rebuilds after the storm, it “makes sense” to replace the deteriorating copper with much more resilient -- and higher bandwidth -- fiber, said Maguire. If you put a penny and a drinking glass on your front porch, the penny will obviously corrode first, he said. “Metal and water have a tendency to not get along all that well.” Dry copper is reliable and has served networks well for years, but when water is driven into the cable, “it’s a constant battle” to “try to keep the copper in pristine condition,” he said. Not only does water corrode the cable, it also conducts in the low-voltage electronic signal, leading to problems like crosstalk, he said. Water doesn’t “wreak havoc” on fiber, which is glass-based, or distort the light signal coming through, Maguire said. Technicians have to ensure the ends are clean where the fiber terminates in the fiber hubs, but “the corrosive salt water won’t do as much damage -- or any damage that I can see,” he said.

"The copper network was actually harder hit than anything,” said FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell. “Once you flood that with sea water, it’s kind of shot,” he said at an event Tuesday organized by the University of Colorado’s Silicon Flatirons program. There should be incentives to replace copper with fiber, which holds up much better under the circumstances, he said. “We need to make that part of the conversation.” Government shouldn’t use natural disasters as a “pretext” to get more unnecessary regulation into the telecom space, he said: The issues are complex, and we shouldn’t rush to judgment. “Do you want 1,000 gallons of diesel on your roof during a thunderstorm?” McDowell asked. “During a lightning storm?”

Yet in the rush to upgrade to an all-IP future run over fiber and LTE networks, some worry that the technology, while faster, is nowhere near as reliable as copper. FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel spoke this week of the need for an “honest accounting” of the resiliency of the wireless and fiber infrastructure (CD Nov 14 p3). “Wireless and IP-based networks don’t come close to wireline’s reliability standards, Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld wrote on his blog (http://xrl.us/bnznsr). “What happens” to consumers in the 22 states with households buying AT&T’s wireline service “when that older, more expensive but more reliable technology is replaced with better, faster but more fragile technology,” he asked.

In the states where AT&T is the ILEC that provides that copper, fewer than three of 10 customers are on the copper network, meaning most customers no longer have line powering associated with their communications service, said Hultquist. “The horse has left the barn,” he said of the transition to IP networks. “It’s too late to think about, ‘Wait a minute, we have to save line powering!’ Consumers have already chosen: We are making decisions that don’t have line powering” included. The PSTN has benefits like line powering, but IP networks “clearly” have their own benefits, such as using a “much flatter architecture” and giving consumers the ability to use different kinds of communication, Hultquist said. “We can’t kid ourselves that there aren’t going to be some features of the PSTN that we either have already largely lost, or will decide, that’s not going to make it across this transition,” he said. “I don’t think there’s much the regulators can do. The regulator is the tail, not the dog in that world.”