When you’ve been in the field for more than 90 years, like SureWest
Communications, you’re bound to pick up a few things. You pick up about
250,000 Northern California customers and a reputation as a trail
blazer in the fiber-to-the-premises world. Perhaps most importantly,
you pick up some best practices. What follows are 11 insights the
company has learned in the field.

SureWest Communications is one of the nation’s leading integrated
communications providers. Serving the Northern California region since
1914, the company offers advanced digital and high-definition video,
high-speed Internet, local and long distance telephone, and PCS
wireless services.

Recently, SureWest Communications Vice President of Network
Operations Scott Barber and Network Services Equipment Engineer Larry
Jenkins weighed in on some valuable lessons, 11 Best Practices, they’ve
learned working together in the FTTH field.

Best Practice #1. Define What Success Means to You
Metrics for success differ from firm to firm. Be sure the team understands what “the end zone” looks like.

“For me, success is getting a flow going. Getting a process together
where we don’t even have to think about supply or material problems,”
said Jenkins. “We can just start building and really get into the
production mode.”

From a construction standpoint, Barber has a slightly different take
on success. “We measure our cost metrics from a cost-per-home-passed
perspective. Part of our success in lowering that metric is being able
to serve as many homes as we possibly can per deployment. So density is
a big concern of ours. We’ve shifted our costs to more of a
success-based capital model; we spend it as the customers come instead
of spending it upfront and hoping that one day the customers will come.”

Barber continues, “When we talk about success-based capital, the
more we can engineer that into our thinking and our design, the better.
In a couple of areas we are utilizing what we call success-based taps.
Instead of putting a terminal or a fiber tap location at every pole, we
go back and splice that in when we actually have a customer that needs
to be served from that pole.”

Best Practice #2. Capacity Is King
While location is the bottom line in real estate, capacity can make or break a communications provider.

“SureWest is building an active point-to-point fiber system, so we
literally design fibers to serve every single home we pass. We don’t
know if we’ll win the first home or the fifth home…or the first five
homes and miss the next 20 homes. So you have to know that you have
enough fiber in the field to serve – if, in fact, you want every
customer in that neighborhood,” Barber said.

It’s not unusual for SureWest Communications to achieve 40 percent
penetration in new neighborhoods. “We just can’t tell you which 40
percent we’re going to serve,” Barber said. “If you bring 100 percent
of those fibers all the way back, you’ve got a lot of unused fiber
cable chewing up real estate in the cabinet that can be utilized for
something else.”

Best Practice #3. Don’t Build an Elephant to Kill an Ant
Barber noted that all too often, vendors try to “build an elephant to kill an ant.” He emphasizes the importance of simplicity.

“Larry (Jenkins) has been able to simplify things by eliminating a
lot of unnecessary materials that vendors were building into their
products,” Barber said. “This helped reduce expenses and bring overall
costs down. Obviously, this requires some time and effort up front to
work in the design stage. But once you have the flow of product
happening on its own, the costs come down substantially.”

Best Practice #4. Flexibility Is Key
Rigidity has no
place in business. And it’s important to find partners who are as
flexible and adaptable as you are. “We’re not asking those companies to
stop doing what they’re doing for the RBOC,” Barber explained. “We’re
just asking for them to have the flexibility to do the customization
necessary to develop products that fit our needs.”

Flexibility can be a two-way street, of course. “We’re perfectly
willing to work with our vendors to develop products,” Barber said. “In
the end, if those products work for the vendor with other companies,
that’s great. Their success is our success as well.”

Best Practice #5. Creating Something From Scratch Isn’t Necessarily Cost-Prohibitive
When people hear “custom-made”, they often hear “cost-prohibitive”.
SureWest Communications found that simply was not the case. “It was the
opposite for us. We were able to cut costs as much as 60 percent,”
Jenkins said. “If we were to compare the original product to the
modular expandable cabinet, we saved money in the first phase. And by
the time the modular cabinet made it to the third phase, we saved about
three times.”

Best Practice #6. Learn From Your Past Missteps
Jenkins admits that there have been missteps along the way. The key is
not only admitting to them, it’s learning from them as well. He cites
early in the process when they tried to shoehorn an existing CO product
into an outside plant cabinet.

“Initially we tried to work with an off-the-shelf remote terminal
(RT) cabinet of a large vendor who wouldn’t make changes to help us
solve a few of our problems without charging a huge amount of money.
When we transitioned from splice-only to patch-and-splice, it was very
difficult to install the new equipment in those cabinets. We ended up
with some damaged fiber. And we continued to struggle with it, until we
decided it was time to find something completely different.”

SureWest Communications went back to the drawing board and enlisted
the help of Clearfield, Inc., formerly APA Cables & Networks. “We
decided to start from scratch and develop a completely new RT cabinet.
We relied on Clearfield’s engineering staff to help develop fiber
panels and fiber management that made the most sense for our
situation,” Jenkins said.

Together, they addressed all of the problems that came with the
original cabinet layout, and wound up with a fiber management design
that was very easy to work with. “I’ve gotten compliments from the guys
in the field that work with these cabinets on a daily basis. That’s a
big thing. Usually if something isn’t working out very well, you don’t
hear about it unless you corner someone and ask,” Jenkins said.

Best Practice #7. Make Silk Purses Out of Pigtails
Previously, SureWest Communications subscribed to a success-based
splicing approach. When a new customer signed on, they would
hard-splice a feeder onto a distribution cable connected directly to a
new subscriber’s home. With fiber pigtails spliced onto the outside
plant cable, however, the possibility of damaged fiber was significant.
“Over time, we ended up with quite a fiber management mess,” Jenkins
reported.

“Plus, the operational expense was significantly elevated every time
SureWest had to roll a splicer,” said Clearfield’s CEO, Cheri Beranek
Podzimek.

The solution: a more modular approach. “While field techs are still
doing splicing, they now are doing it to pre-terminated tails inside a
fiber management platform that allows them to interconnect and make
changes a lot easier,” Podzimek said.

Now, once the splice is done on a cabinet, it’s done. “When you turn
up the service, you just lay in a patch. It’s much less disruptive.
It’s quicker and less trouble for the customer,” Jenkins said.

Best Practice #8. Grandma Is Always Watching
Hiding in plain sight can be a real challenge. So, SureWest
Communications strives to minimize the number of units they place in
the field. “From an outside plant construction perspective, we have
about 140 units in targeted areas around the Sacramento area, for
example,” Barber said. “That will probably double over the next couple
of years. Local municipalities aren’t terribly fond of having these
cabinets in their residential neighborhoods. As attractive as Larry
(Jenkins) designed them, you don’t want to put one of them right in
front of Grandma Jones’ house. So by being able to terminate more of
these fibers in the cabinets, we can serve a greater area. We also have
the necessary modularity to minimize the number of cabinets we place in
the field. Of course, we try to place them more strategically in
industrial areas or heavy utility locations.”

“Anything we can do to minimize the number of cabinets and
demonstrate that we’re sensitive to concerns about aesthetics, the
better off we are in getting the necessary approvals from the local
municipalities,” said Barber.

SureWest Communications also has a Quick Graffiti Program. If a
cabinet is defaced in any way, it is repainted within 24 hours. “We do
things like this (program) just to prove that we’re good neighbors,” he
said.

Best Practice #9. Adapt for the Future
Anticipating future capacity needs is critical for growth. For this
reason, SureWest Communications has deployed a cross-connect cabinet
that has the ability to scale from 12 to 864 ports without cost
penalty.

“In some areas, we’re looking at doing a 2-to-1 concentration in the
field to get the biggest advantage out of our fiber build and our
equipment. When you’re not the incumbent in these areas, you have to
concentrate your equipment usage by extending it out to the
cross-connect cabinets and then back-filling your equipment ports in a
more cost-effective way,” Jenkins said.

“We’re reutilizing backbone fiber that we already had in place, and
adding distribution fiber out of the backbone fiber on a business
campus. So it’s helping our bottom line in getting fiber out there to
the customers, and making it as efficient as possible to utilize that
fiber.”

Barber added, “It prevents you from bringing all of those
distribution fibers back and terminating them, even when you know
you’re not going to use them all. You don’t know which ones you’re not
going to use, so it allows you to more efficiently build the outside
plant.”

Best Practice #10. Embrace Change
The world of FTTH is changing minute-by-minute. That means companies
have to anticipate and embrace new technology. SureWest Communications
began fiber-to-the-curb deployment in 1998, PON deployment in 2000, and
active point-to-point deployment in 2002. Today they serve more than
100,000 homes passed with fiber and roughly another 100,000 with copper.

“While we’ve selected alternative electronics vendors over the years
based upon the environment and application, fiber management solutions
from Clearfield have been our standard,” Jenkins explained.

Best Practice #11. Reward Good Thinking
SureWest Communications understands that innovation needs to be coaxed
along at times. “We have an internal recognition program by which
employees can submit ideas for expense savings or revenue
opportunities,” Barber said. “A committee reviews the concepts, and if
we implement an idea or are interested in doing so, we have a sliding
scale of reward up to $3,500, depending on the level of benefit to the
company. At the end-of-the-year annual awards banquet, we take all
those ideas and any others that were submitted, and select an
Innovation Award for the year.” Larry Jenkins, with the support of
Clearfield as the product design partner, is a multiple winner.

Don’t be Afraid to Try New Things
Barber takes a page from Nike’s “Just Do It” motto. He advises, “You
just have to get started. You can’t be scared of it. FTTH can be done.
It can be effective. And it can have a substantial return on
investment, especially when you’re working with vendors who want to see
you be successful.”

“My advice to companies is: don’t waffle. Don’t get into paralysis by analysis. Just get started.”

About the Author - Johnny Hill

Johnny
Hill is Vice President of Engineering and Product Management,
Clearfield, Inc. Clearfield, Inc., formerly APA Cables & Networks.
Clearfield provides a complete line of fiber and copper assemblies for
controlled and outside plant environments. For more information, visit
www.clearfieldconnection.com.