AFC stumbles

For some time, Telephony has been hearing rumors of some rough spots in AFC's role as a supplier of FTTP gear to Verizon. Last night it became official, as the vendor announced having missed the last two of the contract's first five technological milestone requirements (see story below).

Though neither Verizon nor AFC consider the infraction a trivial matter, it's perhaps not surprising given the scale of the project and its lack of precedent in America as well as the short amount of time AFC has been in the FTTP business. Component shortages in PON cards caused AFC to miss its target by 21 days, which AFC CEO John Schofield humbly suggests is "not a huge miss...in a project of this magnitude."

In fact, call me an optimist (hell, call me an optometrist if you think I'm helping you see this more clearly), but I think it's a good sign for the industry (and even for AFC to some extent) that one of the country's leading suppliers of FTTP equipment is having trouble keeping up with demand. It brings to mind the meltdowns America Online used to have in the second half of the 1990s when subscriber growth overwhelmed the company.

Earlier this week, Verizon announced the next two publicly named towns in its FTTP deployment (see story below), both of which are appreciably larger than the first. And I'm hearing rumors that the carrier is also deploying FTTP in its local franchise territory in the Northeast at quite a good clip in order to reach its goal of 1 million homes passed this year. Also, AFC's Schofield said yesterday that orders for FTTP equipment from independent telcos are increasing and that a lot of AFC's existing DLC customers are shifting their spending from pure DLCs to FTTP gear.

"This is serious," Schofield said yesterday of his recent troubles. I agree with him in more ways than one.

Heard any optical gossip lately? E-mail me at egubbins@primediabusiness.com.