Telcoms expert on Verizon's fiber maintenance procedures

David Isenberg (a well-known telcoms wonk — former Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Labs, author of the classic “Stupid Network” paper, member of the FCC’s National Broadband team) lost his Verizon fiber network access a week ago in a storm. Since then, he’s been blogging the wasteful, inefficient and bizarre ways that Verizon maintains its network, with the sharp eye of a telcoms specialist. It’s great reading. Verizon has a soft spot in my heart for being one of the few phone companies in America that refused to participate in illegal mass wiretapping under GW Bush (Whoops, that was Qwest! Verizon built a circuit straight into Quantico), but as far as I can tell, every phone company runs its infrastructure like this.

Brian put a little red laser light on the end of my fiber that points back into the network and went about 750 m down the road to the splitter box. At the splitter box he literally tried to see the light at the other end of the fiber.

Only about 10-15% of the ports in the splitter box were occupied — this is not a sustainable take rate under anybody’s business model. FIOS has been in our neighborhood since 2005. You’d think they’d have signed up a few more FIOS customers.

Brian the technician explained the different ways that technicians map drops to splitters. There’s standard company practice, then there’s a variation on that (offset by one), then there’s the possibility that a repair or a mistake screws up the whole system. He tried all the logical alternatives and did not see the light. Then he proposed to unplug every fiber to rule out the (very real) possibility that my service had been mapped onto a random port. This, of course, would interrupt every FIOS phone call and Internet stream. I egged him on, saying that the whole neighborhood has been getting service glitches since the Big Storm. We unplugged every fiber momentarily, but we never saw the light.

Verizon doesn’t know what Verizon knows

(Image: 2008_04_biketrail_infrastructure_063
infrastructure, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike image from dsearls’ photostream)