There is no doubt in my mind that high-speed Internet, IPTV, and Video on Demand (VoD), plus a myriad of other new features, are the salvation of the telephone industry. Most new subdivisions will be fiber-to-the-home (FTTH). Service to existing subdivisions will be done by fiber-to-the-node (FTTN), and then paired copper wire for The Last Mile.

Domestically, embedded copper cable pairs worth about 170 billion dollars provide services to telco customers on a daily basis. These copper conductors provide innumerable services, including Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS), ADSL, HDSL, SDSL, T1, DID trunks, and IPTV, to name just a few.

How this embedded copper is provisioned and maintained will determine your telephone company's future. But taking advantage of the future potential is largely dependent on whether the executives believe in and implement a proactive approach to maintenance, and whether the managers and technicians faithfully adopt these programs. For many, this is a drastic change and may seem time-consuming and expensive but without it, customers will be lost to competitors.

Unfortunately, in today's environment, most main-tenance teams implement a reactive system to restore service when a customer complains. Restoring service is the goal, right? It should be. The goal should be fixing both the short-term and long-term problems to restore service today, and to make his line suitable for advanced services.

A good example of a reactive approach ("fix it now") is when there is water intrusion into a buried splice. The customer complains of static on the line, and initial testing shows crossed battery coming from other working pairs in the splice.

A repair technician is dispatched and proves the problem into the distribution plant. Management has the technician move the customer to another distribution pair that "tests good". Problem fixed - at least for today. Then, as more water enters the splice, more customers complain, and more circuits are transferred until finally there are no "good circuits" to cut to clear the service.

Eventually, there's the last customer who can't get a good line, so cable maintenance is dispatched and identifies the problem and opens the splice. The water is drained out and the customer is put back in service…for now. The splice should have been rebuilt, but the management team pushes the cable maintenance technician on to the next dispatch.

Using this reactive process keeps 80% of the field technicians and support groups working on the effect of the problems with the infrastructure, and never getting to the root cause. This is revenue that you can throw out into the street and watch it blow away because there is no return on investment for reactive maintenance.

POTS service is very forgiving but AC interference can play havoc on a maintenance team. A good example of this occurred last week with one of my special services managers of a large telco. Fred called me because a DID trunk would not function. The customer was in a rural area a few miles from the central office.

The circuit was cleared of DC type faults and was provisioned to 5.5dBm but it would not function properly. The special services technician stated that there was a hum on the line and also on any POTS circuit that worked through the cross-connect box.

I asked Fred to turn the problem over to cable maintenance; after some reluctance to accept this as their problem, a cable maintenance technician was dispatched. Power influence measured to the quiet line termination indicated 97dBrnC. By guiding the cable maintenance technician through a series of tests, we determined that the root cause is a bonding and grounding issue and not a power company issue.

A history showed that customers in this county were complaining of a hum on the line for more than 10 years. This problem will only be resolved because the special circuit will not function until they fix it. Countless truck rolls and untold dollars were spent on the effect of this problem and will continue to be spent until this problem is resolved.

This reactive process is also used for ADSL customers. The ADSL circuit does not run at speed or drops because of DC type faults, AC interference, or the customer is at or beyond the reach of the system. Rather than identify root cause, the circuit is capped at a lower speed, which creates customer frustration to the point where they go to the competition.

The salvation of any telephone company is a proactive maintenance program that identifies any problems in the circuit, such as DC type faults, AC interference, longitudinal balance, faulty ports, and engineering design faults that place the customer beyond the reach of the circuit.

If we are going to use copper for bandwidth, circuits must be constantly monitored, problems must be proactively identified, and root causes repaired to satisfy customer needs and to eliminate service interruptions.

My statement in an earlier column still applies: today's ILECs have two choices.

Choice 1. Continue to reactively support POTS and ignore the infrastructure until your competitor forces you to bankruptcy.

Choice 2. Proactively reinforce your infrastructure by fixing bad plant, fiber feed remotes, cross-connect boxes, fiber-to-the-curb, and fiber-to-the-home to provide your customer an acceptable amount of bandwidth for high speed Internet, IPTV, Video on Demand, and Voice over Packet.

Signing off
What happened to you recently that you'd like to share (anonymously if you desire) with your fellow colleagues so that you can get their thoughts, or so that you can help them with a repair? Send me your ideas: dmccarty@mccartyinc.com or 831.818.3930. As always, thanks for reading and for your support - Happy Holidays and the best to all of you for 2008.

About the Author - Don McCarty

LET`S TALK Check out our website (www.mccartyinc.com). In addition to providing information about our extensive selection of courses, we are adding an equipment review section and a section on troubleshooting, where we will discuss some interesting cases of trouble. If you have an interesting case, send it along (names withheld by request).

As always, I appreciate hearing from you with questions or comments on any topics that you think are of general interest to outside plant technicians and managers.

McCarty Associates
18281 NE Rainbow Lane
Newberg, OR 97132
Telephone: 503.538.2747
dmccarty@mccartyinc.com