Each POTS cable pair that is fed from a central office or pair gain remote to the customer costs a telco at least $750 for engineering, placement, heating up, and installation. These pairs can be put out of service or have service affecting problems due to cable section failure, such as water in a splice, water in a section of air-core PIC, or sheath damage.

When a technician cuts away from such a pair and moves the circuit to another pair it takes 6.4 years of base rate revenue before that customer will again show as profit to the telco.

In addition, when a cable section is going bad, each circuit cutover will cost the revenue of the cut pair, the labor cost (at an average loaded labor cost of around $190/hour or more), and the eventual major costs of section replacement when you have all of the pairs in the section being used and pairs in the section are still failing.

As our good friend Dave Burnett, a retired General Manager from Southern Bell in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, put it more than 30 years ago, there’s “a gold mine out there” in proactive maintenance of bad sections of distribution plant.

Emphasize “Maintenance” Instead of “Repair”
If you want to save a section of cable, my recommendation is simple (but it’s a long-term strategy and many companies are focused only this quarter’s profits): move to proactive maintenance. Unfortunately, many technicians I meet today are spending their time fixing one-pair problems such as buried drop repair or getting a single pair for new service. Their title says “maintenance” but their job description is “repair.”

Upon applying a proper analysis procedure, I usually discover that many sections of cable could have been repaired had the cause been correctly identified. Often the cause was a splice that leaked or a damaged cable sheath. Left to time, these sections were inundated with water and they needed to be replaced.

I find that I can train a good technician to save more than 50% of the bad sections by identifying and fixing the cause, rather than replacing them. When the cause of the problem isn’t easily found, the section is turned over to engineering for replacement where it can sit for months or even years depending on the backlog.

A Proven Proactive Process That May Work for You
How do you get to the fix the first time out? This requires communication between the service and maintenance technicians, and expert knowledge of the available tools and computer. Use the computer as your early warning device by acting instead of reacting; hundreds of thousands of dollars can be saved. The service technicians are there to handle the one-pair problems in the distribution plant. This service technician can often visually identify a problem even before the computer has reported on it, and he can then update the maintenance technician. This can free up the maintenance technician to handle cable problems.

A good example of this practice in use occurred in several RBOCs as long ago as the ‘80s and ‘90s. They had a major problem with bad sections and unacceptable cable conditions. Cross boxes and ready-access terminals needed replacement. High ambient temperatures were playing havoc with PIC insulation, and the plant in general needed to be locked up for its own protection.

Customer demands for new service, along with service-affecting and out-of-service troubles, were pulling the maintenance technicians from preventive maintenance into the trouble load. Plant quality was rapidly deteriorating. In some RBOCs proactive managers and their staff recognized the need for thorough preventive maintenance. They devised a three-step approach to the problem.

Step 1. Analysis: Groups used the Predictor program that identified high-priority projects that needed fixing. The Predictor program indicated a potential cable failure weeks and sometimes months before service was affected. In order to attack these, the maintenance crew needed to be free from the load.

Step 2. Training: Proactive managers and staff trained and equipped the service technicians to handle the one pair problems, such as defective drops, wires pinched or open in associated terminals, or cross connects that were caused by other technicians in the course of their daily activity. Supervisors and managers who did not have a cable maintenance background were also trained to assist the technicians. This released the cable maintenance crews for
the priority projects.

Step 3. Quality: Each and every technician, supervisor, and manager became part of a quality team, with customer service as their primary goal. When a maintenance technician, following up a service tech’s plant condition report, identified a bad cable needing replacement or a terminal needed to be rebuilt, locked up, or replaced and whenever repairs couldn’t be made on the spot.

The maintenance technician became the coordinator between engineering and construction. When the job was completed, the maintenance technician personally informed the service technician who originally identified the problem that correction had been achieved. This communication helped morale as everyone was informed of results; they felt the company was listening and acting, and that they were an important part of the complete process.

Results didn’t occur overnight, and many obstacles had to be overcome, such as old habits and resistance to the new order: “We’ve always done it like this; it’s worked fine” “The test sets don’t work”, etc. Training and constant communication between departments resolved most of these.

The Reactive Business Plan for Failure
The antithesis of the proactive philosophy is exemplified by reactive managers. Reactive managers encourage technicians to cutover, and then later the manager will have to send out a restoration team to bulk recover the cut pairs. This practice presents two main problems:

Problem 1. Pair problems are shot-gunned throughout the distribution plant. Some are single-pair faults which could be fixed on the spot, and some are actual cable trouble which will eventually affect multiple pairs and force section replacement. The bulk-recovery theory masks potential cable faults which must be found and fixed at once.

Problem 2. Preventive maintenance is hindered to the point where its cost becomes prohibitive. Analysis of bad sections can take months. By the time the cable is fully analyzed, the original trouble has caused the total destruction of the section.

The only solution is mass cable replacement. Untrained technicians will destroy the new plant in a few very short years using the same bad practice. The general defense of the cut-to-clear bulk recovery practice is that we are going fiber to the house, anyway. By the time the reactive management team gets fiber to the house, the customer will be so disgruntled that he’ll use the competitor’s service.

Signing off
I’ll be at OSP EXPO 2008 answering some of the toughest questions - your questions - about cable fault locating, maintenance, and repair during my “Ask the OSP Expert” sessions taking place on Wednesday, October 22, and Thursday, October 23. 

This is a no-holds-barred OSP Q&A session. Take advantage of this opportunity and put me to the test. Send your questions to me at dmccarty@mccartyinc.com. (If you want your questions answered but don’t want your name or company name shared, just let me know, and we’ll keep that info confidential.)