nice to see you "rejoin" the board, frank.
as a resident of Beltropolis (read: DC), i can definitely attest to this ...
... but all it really takes is a couple articles in the (other) Post, a quick lambasting of the contractors by mayor williams, and two days later, it's back to:
wavplace.com
ride the metro(media).
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Electronic Engineering Times
June 12, 2000, Issue: 1117
Section: CommWeek
Fiber-optic wars are on
LORING WIRBEL
techweb.com
Did you catch Charles Murray's May 23 front-page piece on the move to electronic controls in heavy-equipment cabs? Since alternative telecom carriers are one of the biggest users of backhoes these days, a shift from hydraulics to microcontrollers could speed the use of position-location services like GPS. That could shorten the periods of neighborhood devastation for plants and lessen the possibility of fiber cuts, which outrage business and residential broadband customers alike.
There's just one problem: The competition for fiber-based local access is so fierce right now, that alternative carriers seem to be using fiber cutting as a strategic weapon. Ask the folks in neighborhoods like Washington, D.C.'s Embassy Row/Adams-Morgan, where streets have been torn up by one carrier contractor after another. As soon as one fly-by-night service provider is done laying fiber conduit, another moves in to lay new fiber, and the first task at hand is usually slicing up the previous company's fiber.
The nastiness is been heightened by two factors: Many more small carriers have elected to go "facilities-based" (owning their own cable in the ground) than had been expected a few years ago, and a resulting shortage of fiber-optic cable, lasers and optical connectors has thwarted the plans of carriers and communication OEMs alike. In such an atmosphere, foiling your competitor's plans for outside plant seems to be a key goal.
The original vision, in the late 1990s, was that the incumbent carriers and a couple of key competitive local carriers would lay metro fiber with heavy use of dense wave-division multiplexing and would then wholesale bandwidth to smaller carriers in the region. But today even the little guys want to own their fiber. That carries the advantage of pushing dark fiber availability closer to the end customer, making some owners of multitenant buildings fiber managers in their own right, and pumping up the popularity of passive optical networks.
Plenty of the small carriers are honest folks. But the democratization of fiber has bred questionable operators. Such carriers will be on the front lines in the coming backhoe wars. Many will want to upgrade backhoe cabs for electronic controls, but not necessarily for position-finding. For them the backhoe becomes an armored personnel carrier. If you've been upset by detoured digs and fiber cuts in your neighborhood, just wait until Round 2 of the broadband fiber war brings the backhoe battles to your curb.
Ride the light. |
