FTTH North, East and West

They came together from opposite edges of the map: the Atlantic Coast, the Pacific Ocean and the Great White North. At the Fiber-to-the-Home Conference in Las Vegas last month, representatives from three independent telcos gathered to share their experiences deploying FTTH. Though they shared a common goal and some common problems, many of their biggest challenges were posed by the unique characteristics of their respective geographies and corporate identities, which led them to take different paths. Their stories illustrate that one size does not fit all in fiber access. What FTTH is depends largely on whose it is and where it is being deployed.

HAWAIIAN TELCOM

“Aloha,” said Gerry Sagucio, senior manager of network engineering and planning for Hawaiian Telcom. And then, after a beat, “No, I'm just kidding. We don't actually talk like that.”

Like Hawaii itself, this island telco has been around forever but came under its current ownership relatively recently. HT became an independent just last year after nearly half a century as a Bell company. The company was originally incorporated in 1883 by the Kingdom of Hawaii through a charter that is still has framed on the boardroom's wall. In 1967, it was acquired by GTE, which was itself acquired by Bell Atlantic in 2000 to form Verizon Communications.

Verizon Hawaii had the kind of prominence within Verizon as the Hawaiian islands do on a map of the U.S. With about 690,000 lines, the telco represented about 1% of Verizon's lines. It wasn't high on the list of places to deploy FiOS, for example. But the company regained its sovereignty last year when it was sold to the Carlyle Group, a private equity investment firm. The red checkmark logos were removed, and the company was renamed Hawaiian Telecom.

Finally unshackled, the company is planning plenty of changes, as some of its network infrastructure harkens back to the days of the kingdom: concrete poles from the 1920s and lead cable from the 1950s. The company is currently shopping for new broadband loop carriers and Class 4 softswitches. And it hopes to begin deploying a mix of fiber to the curb, fiber to the node and fiber to the premises (for greenfields) in next year's first quarter.

“Don't hold me to that,” Sagucio said of the timetable.

The downside of being free from Verizon's rule is that HT can no longer rely on its corporate parents to test, choose and purchase new technology. For example, HT wants to deploy MPEG-4 set-tops, which feature the next generation of video compression technology. However, MPEG-4 set-tops are in high demand and have so far been in short supply. And as a small company, HT has a hard time getting the attention of set-top vendors, Sagucio said.

To make up for its lost parent, HT is searching for siblings — four or five carriers to partner with, sharing best practices, institutional knowledge and perhaps even product evaluations.

But some of the company's challenges are unique to its geography. For example, trenching costs in Hawaii are four to six times what they are in the contiguous states. Is that because of all the nearly impenetrable volcanic rock there? Or the dearth of competition in the tiny state? Sagucio isn't sure. But to bring costs down to mainland levels, HT uses microfiber cable. And thankfully, 60% of the carrier's outside plant is aerial rather than underground.

Also, as land is in short supply in Hawaii, real estate is expensive, as is land easement. That makes it hard to convince developers to agree to include provisions for FTTP in new homes. “We have to be careful how we negotiate,” Sagucio said. “We're requiring two large cabinets for each house and the power to them. That's not sitting well with a lot of developers. They want to know what's in it for them.”

That problem is the same one facing another independent telco on the far side of the continent.

SASKTEL

The last government-owned incumbent left in Canada, SaskTel will celebrate its centennial in 2008. In 2007, the company plans to extend fiber to 4000 brownfield homes (half aerially, half underground) and 200 greenfield homes. But no matter how that trial goes, the company won't attempt to launch FTTP more broadly until sometime after its 100th birthday.

“We'll let our guys get their hands dirty some more,” said Mike Nijman, SaskTel's concept planner. “We're looking to move slow.”

For SaskTel, a fiber rollout comes with strings that don't get attached to privately held entities. Because it's government owned, the company will have to deploy FTTP equally to all area residents, not just in the places that offer the best economics. For that reason, it's especially important to keep the costs of the project down.

“The brownfield scares the crap out of us,” Nijman said. “The numbers just look bad. No matter what you do, moving dirt is the same expense.”

SaskTel has developers (of all people) to thank for one convenience: Their decision to bury cabling in the backyards of homes rather than the front makes maintenance much easier. To minimize the need for repairs to the last segment of fiber leading to the house, the company houses each such “drop” with 1-inch, high-density polyethylene conduit. At about a quarter per foot, it costs about $15 per house. “If a customer can cut it with a spade, that's a pretty tough customer,” Nijman said.

And SaskTel is willing to make the upfront investments necessary to protect the network over the long run; in fact, it must. “If I'm not getting forty or fifty years out of this cable, it's not worthwhile,” Nijman said.

To survive in SaskTel's neck of the woods, any network has to be tough. The company is based in Regina, Saskatchewan (north of the Montana/North Dakota border), where daily temperatures over the course of a year average 37° F. As such, the weather influences most of the decisions SaskTel makes in rolling out FTTP. For example, the company chose a type of patch cord, not offered by any major vendors, that was designed by the military to withstand temperatures of -58° F. More common patch cords turned brittle in the cold.

“At thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, these things turn into little sticks,” Nijman said. “Trying to maneuver cords up and down gets very difficult.”

All the pedestals the company uses are made locally, part of a commitment by SaskTel to support its local businesses. But the carrier hates to use handholes (breadbox-sized cabinets that are mostly buried, with a face-up access door even with the ground), as they're too hard to find in winter when the area gets, on average, more than 2 1/2 feet of snow. (Winters are long, too; snow in May and September isn't unheard of.) And snow isn't the only problem. When it rained, the handholes SaskTel was trialing filled with water and stayed full for a month.

“I don't want my plant sitting in water for 25% of its life,” Nijman said. There is one type of handhole the company endorses, however: One manufacturer designed a bottomless concrete vault — not much more expensive than a standard handhole — that won't collect rain and is sturdy enough to withstand the seasonal expansion and contraction of the ground through a long, tough Saskatchewan winter.

PLANTERS

A 55-year-old phone cooperative in rural Georgia with 43 employees and 10,000 access lines, Planters Rural Telephone Cooperative has recently come under siege from Comcast, a company thousands of times its size. And it doesn't believe it can defend itself with DSL alone.

“The problem with DSL is that what works when we put that customer in might not work six months in,” said Stephen Milner, Planters' general manager. “Customers whose service was working just fine all of sudden start to have quality issues. You don't have that with fiber to the home.”

Planters is deploying passive optical networking (PON) gear from Calix, whose acquisition of Optical Solutions made it the leader of the Gigabit PON (GPON) market. But as Calix's GPON platform wasn't available when the carrier made its selection, Planters is deploying the same speed of PON Verizon is deploying now, which yields about 100 Mb/s to the home.

“We were torn,” Milner said. “We hated to put that in when we felt it might already be dated by the time we rolled it out.”

Still, Milner is happy with the ease of lighting homes. “We were so scared of trying this, but it's just glass and light,” he said. “You don't have to have skilled labor. They could send me out, and I could hook up a customer.”

Milner lucked into another time- and labor-saving step. Because the timing happened to be right, Planters was one of three independent telcos (the others being West Kentucky Rural Telephone Cooperative and Valley Telephone Cooperative in southern Texas) invited to participate this summer in a beta test of a wholesale IPTV head-end and programming package offered through the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative, a co-op consortium. The program leverages the combined purchasing power of its members to negotiate IP video content and transport contracts, greatly simplifying the process for small telcos. Milner, who was dreading the expense of an IPTV head-end, much prefers the wholesale satellite feed he gets from what he calls the “head-end in the sky.”

Planters doesn't have the same geographic problems SaskTel and Hawaiian Telecom do, located in a state that never sees more than 2 inches of snow more than two days in a row. “I can do construction every day of the year, and I don't have to worry about volcanic rock,” Milner said. “We don't even know what snow looks like.”

What he does have to worry about, however, is lightning. Planters is headquartered a couple hours north of Florida, which happens to be the lightning capital of the world. In a typical year, at least one Georgian is killed by lightning, and more than half of the state's weather-related property damage is caused by lightning. Milner blames lightning for about half of Planters' problems. But he can fight that threat with fiber because fiber is lightning's natural enemy.

“Copper is a conductor, and glass is an insulator,” Milner said. “If we can minimize by half [the amount of lightning-related maintenance work], we have covered our initial cost.”

Though Milner's set of challenges differ vastly from those of his peers across the continent, he has the same problem the folks in the South Pacific do convincing developers to build fiber-fed homes. “Developers do not care,” he said. “If it's going to cost them $30 extra, they don't see the purpose of it.”

At least that much is universal.