Nightmare on Fiber Street

The Web is abuzz with stories of Verizon technicians accidentally hitting gas lines and causing leaks, hitting electrical wires and causing house fires, and hitting sewage pipes and causing stinky puddles in the backyard.

Of course, it didn't help Verizon's PR efforts that one of the houses set ablaze was owned by an Associated Press business writer. Interestingly enough, John Wilen thinks the service is quite good, now that Verizon has paid for the $2650 in repairs to his house.

I think the real lesson here was learned a long time ago by the telecom industry and even longer ago by the cable industry. The business of running wires -- glass or otherwise -- to individual homes is messy, time-consuming and fraught with trouble. More than a decade ago, U S West (now part of Qwest) built a hybrid fiber/coax network in Omaha, Neb. The hassle of building that network so colored the company's view that it became a company anomaly -- no other HFC networks were built, and Qwest has not pursued fiber to the home.

The problems U S West faced were similar to what Verizon is facing now. Or as one executive said several years after building the Omaha network, "We must have paid three times for every rose bush in Omaha."

Cable companies had the same hassles, but theirs occurred before there was an Internet and hundreds of bloggers willing to spread the news.

The only way to get the job of building fiber to the home done is just to do it -- hopefully, learning from mistakes and limiting the serious episodes, which Verizon seems to be doing.

To cook the local broadband omelet, some eggs are going to get broken.

E-mail me at cwilson3@telephonyonline.com.