Our outside plant infrastructure has been neglected for many, many, many years. In the days of Plain Old Telephone service (POTs) before deregulation, a great deal of effort was proactively put into the copper infrastructure. When customer service was interrupted for any reason the root cause was pursued and rectified.

If the problem with the infrastructure that affected customer service proved to be high power influence, then field technicians corrected bonding and grounding issues and transmission engineers pursued and corrected power company issues. In today's environment it seems that, due to workload, transmission engineers rarely leave their office. And that's unfortunate.

On the construction side of the house, conformance testing was done to assure a quality placing and splicing undertaking. To save money, conformance testing was discontinued and the burden of quality assurance was placed on installation repair and cable maintenance. Because of this construction quality has diminished. Shield integrity has suffered and noise has increased on cable pairs.

With deregulation, in an effort to show short term profit for the shareholder, management teams had to cut corners. Proactive maintenance was discontinued and cable maintenance technicians who should have been rectifying cable problems were pushed into the load to support the installation repair technicians.

Cut-to-clear (transferring affected customers to new circuits) became the war cry of reactive maintenance management teams, and field technicians have transferred circuits until there is nothing left. With customers leaving in droves, those reactive Telcos have plenty of extra cable pairs.

It does no good to transfer circuits when the root cause is unacceptable power influence (PI). The root cause has to be identified and rectified. All customers in the cable are affected and many will leave unless corrective action is taken.

In today's environment when unacceptable PI is identified at a customer's, a uninformed manager will often dispatch a cable maintenance technician and tell him to check the bonds from the customer to the central office (CO) or remote. The field technician is continuously interrupted in this process because of load demand, which exacerbates the situation.

If the issue is not resolved by bonding and grounding most field technicians do not have the equipment or training to identify and correct associated distribution power related problems.

If you expect your field technician to solve those complicated noise mitigation problems, at least get him the proper test equipment designed for noise mitigation, train him, and dedicate him to this difficult job of noise mitigation until it is done. If you think it has no effect on bandwidth services such as ADSL, HDSL, T1, and FTTN IPTV, guess again.

Signing off
Questions on problems you are having, tips for others, or comments on my columns: contact me at dmccarty@mccartyinc.com. Check out my blog on OSP® Magazine online: www.ospmag.com/columnists/mccarty/talkback.