CAREY'S CARRIER: A CONVERSATION WITH SBC'S ERNIE CAREY

While Verizon Communications was trumpeting its first fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) deployment in Keller, Texas, SBC was quietly installing fiber in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin (halfway between Milwaukee and Madison) for a trial to be conducted in the first “model homes” of the Pabst Farms planned community now under construction. SBC is due to have 3 Mb/s symmetrical broadband service to those model homes (there will be about 23) turned up by the time the homes are finished in August. Pabst Farms is the first of five trials SBC announced in January that it would conduct this year. The next one, a brownfield/greenfield mix in Canton, Mich., will occupy the same general time frame (lasting about a year, according to SBC). Ernie Carey, the company’s vice president of advanced access technologies, spoke with Telephony's Ed Gubbins about the education his team is getting in Oconomowoc and elsewhere.

On the learning curve: We’ve been building copper for a lot of years, but we haven’t been building FTTP for a lot of years, and we’ve probably got some things we need to learn. Mission Bay [SBC’s first FTTP deployment in San Francisco, Calif.] is a very dense, urban, bay-area [greenfield] deployment. When you do brownfields, that’s a different animal. We want to learn the differences in construction costs, what kind of things do we have to tweak in the way of processes and engineering and construction operations between greenfield versus brownfield, buried versus aerial [fiber], how sensitive the outside plant hardware is. We want to make this stuff as soldier-proof as we can, and how that stuff performs in Wis. or Mich., where you’ve got really extreme cold temperatures a good part of the year, versus deep-south Texas, where it gets hot as Hades a good portion of the year.

On aerial versus buried fiber: A lot of it depends on what part of the U.S. you’re in. In southern New England, you get a higher proportion of aerial. In the Midwest, you get more buried. Beyond that, most new developments tend to want the facilities to be buried from an aesthetic point of view. Older, more mature subdivisions may have been built some time ago using aerial plant that’s probably still there. It depends more on that than [north/south distinctions such as] whether it’s in Oklahoma or the upper peninsula of Michigan. We’ve got a lot of aerial plant in Oklahoma, too.

On offering 3 Mb/s broadband in Pabst Farms: As succeeding generations of the technology come out, the ability to move the product to a true BPON standard--622 Mb/s downstream, 155 Mb/s up--is there. The early stuff had some 45-Mb/s chokes in the network limiting the bandwidth we wanted to offer. Those things are going away. As they go away and people make equipment that’s truly up to the FSAN BPON standard, we’re able to offer data speeds we couldn’t do in the early Mission Bay days. We sometimes forget about Mission Bay being one of our early adopter trials. It’s been there so long, it’s sort of old news at SBC.

On video: We’re still working through myriad issues relative to video. Are we attracted to video? Yeah, very. Have we got every bit of the video pie cooked yet? No. We’ve got regulatory issues we’re working through.

On Verizon’s FTTP deployment in Keller, Texas: I don’t think it creates any particular sense of urgency above and beyond what we already have.