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Fl. County Halts FTTP Until Installation Is Safer
celerityfm writes "Warning: Deploying Verizon's new Fiber To The Premises (FTTP, see previous) in YOUR neighborhood may involve geysers of raw sewage spewing onto your front yard or sinkholes opening and swallowing moving vehicles. Well, Hillsborough County, host to one of the first FTTP trial sites, has ordered Verizon to stop deployment of FTTP until they can figure out how to stop creating sinkholes that open up under minivans with children inside. No word on whether SBC is having similar problems with their fiber roll-out."
I mean, viruses and email scams are dangerous and all, but there's really no reason to panic.
-HJ
I used to work as a contractor for Verizon (VZ) in the Tampa area for a short time. Do note that to VZ, a Pentium II with 64 MB of ram is considered 'top of the line' to them, so go knows what kind of equipment they are using in the field for keeping track of what fiber is going where.
And now they are doing fiber to the home? Hell, the DSL was slow to begin with when they started with homes and businesses. Can't wait to see what the 'promise' and what they actually deliver. Forget about SLA's... they never heard of them.
It would be far faster, it would be far cheaper than digging trenches, and it would be fair easier to pop a fitting inside the house to extract the fiber from the incoming pipe than digging an entire trench!
They have knowledge but they don't have wisdom.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
I have worked utility construction, and yes that stuff does happen from time to time. It happens when old lines are maintained too. Any underground work poses those risks. There are standards and procedures for working underground which are generally adhered too. One of the biggest problems is poor marking of old lines (in the ground and on surveys).
This sounds to me like a complaint of a competitor desperately trying to stop progress.
"brxref
I think every time a FTTP article I must mention this, but this is one plus to living in Utah. the fiber based initiative is community owned and NOT owned by the Telcoms and just think, if there is enough of a geek swell to Utah, we could oust Orrin Hatch! :-) OK, that was delusional thinking, but, but, it might work, plus we'll have FTTH, not just FTTC!! :-) (which won't do much good because of the draconian community indecency policies, which effectively outlaws not only porn but anything >= R rated movies...On second thought, perhaps we can live with the telcoms, at least we can still get our porn from them ;-)
Yep, and they are still up to their dirty tricks. Still getting calls from out-of-state recruiters trying to get in as subcontrators... for salaries far below par. Senior SysAdmins on-call 24x7 are only worth $27.50/hr MAX (straight time, no overtime payments allowed).
You be the judge if you want to work for a company like this. Hear its getting to be as bad as working for MCI and Bellsouth on issues like this as well.
You are right, backhoe outages and the like are nothing new.
:)
But can you find me an example in your Google searches of something as interesting as the fiber to the premises technology deployment causing these problems and THEN the problems being SO BAD that they were covered by major media outlets and then the deployment was BLOCKED by a government agency? What about one involving moving minivans being swallowed by sinkholes and video of cars in other such sinkholes?
When I woke up this morning and saw the headline "County to Verizon: Stop deploying Fiber" or whatever I knew it was a Slashdot story, apparently the editors agree with me
Hope this has cleared up your question sir.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
In theory, no lines should be run above your speptic tank. I believe that is in code in my area. My cable service was actually over the lid of my septic tank, luckily the dude digging did not break it. Off topic here but..
I was impressed as hell with the septic guy I had. He was able to locate my septic lid and dig a 3ft diameter hole exactly over the access lid without any error. He looked at my cleanout plug, looked out in the yard and said right HERE, dug down about 2.5 feet and was directly above the lid. There was no obvious marks in the above grass line as the tank had not been pumped in about 7 years. That guy really knows his shit!
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
You're wrong.
Telecom companies typically do not have the manpower or equipment to dig, because they don't do it full time. Why buy all that expensive equipment and have all those extra employees sitting around when there's nothing to do. And no, maintenance does not justify it: the lines last plenty long enough without maintenance. This means that they hire someone to put the wire in... you know what they're called? subcontractors!
Now since it's not Verizon who's doing the digging but the subcontractors, guess whose responsibility it is to make sure the area is OK to dig in: the people who are doing the actual digging or the people who sit in an office miles away and write the checks to the workers?
Why would a news item involving something like a low-tech subcontractor appear on slashdot? Because someone wanted the Karma for posting a story, and the editors didn't check it out closely. The editor saw "FTTP" & "Verizon" and obviously doesn't know much about the whole process of digging, so it made front page.
Mod appropriately next time. The parent wasn't 'flamebait' because they recognized where the blame should lie, and simply posted about it. At the worst, it should be 'troll' because it's worded in a way that sounds angry and could incite even more angry responses, and at the best it should be 'informative' because it gives a breath of truth to a sketchy article someone submitted for the purpose of getting their name on the front page.
Or is it the poor record-keeping? When you dig, you're supposed to call and have the location of utilities marked. They get marked according to what's in the city of county records. But what you find under ground does not always match:
my neighbor had a gas pipe marked going along the edge of his lawn then doing a 90-degrees turn and going along the other edge. But the gas company saved few feet of pipe and laid it straight along the diagonal, under the lawn.
power line is marked right next to my foundation every time I call for markings. It's about 2 feet away from the foundation, actually.
my other neighbor discovered a buried cable conduit under his lawn, with active cable. Nobody knows what the heck it's doing there, no cable is marked anywhere near.
I think that you mean run the fiber above ground over the telephone poles. The problem is that fiber is sensitive to uv radiation. It darkens the fiber. So to run it above ground you need heavy and expensive cladding. So, naturally running it below ground is the preferred solution.
It's pretty much the same way out here. If you don't mark your lines, it's your problem...
However, in the article, the county is also complaining that the contractors aren't telling what happened when they dig up a line. That's a big problem.
The city I live in is all 100% buried lines. All power, phone, cable, gas and water is buried. No telephone poles anywhere. The only exception is the high-tension towers coming down into the substations.
Early this past spring, the electric utility ran new lines down the street to the distribution transformer at the end of the street.
All the utilities came out and painted lines all over the place indicating where buried lines were. However, about 1/2 the residents on my street wound up with severed phone or cable lines. You could count them, because they were repaired first with temporary lines that you could see running along people's yards, then buried later.
My cable was cut, as was my neighbor to the right. My neighbor to the left had their phone line cut.
No water, sewer or lines were hit, but we likely have copper and iron lines (early 70's placements).
Buried utilities are always a bit of a mess. If Florida expected no incidents like this they are fools at best. Very few utilities have good accurate maps that are 100% free of mistakes. Most are riddled with mistakes and lines get hit. Really, you need to prevent where possible, but hits are going to be common.
-Matt
GPS is becoming more and more common in locating underground utilities. Basically, surveyor-quality GPS readings (using a surveyor GPS rig which not only uses satellite readings, but also local survey points) are taken of underground utilities every X number of feet. This, along with manual depth measurements, can create an accurate 3D utility map.
It's pretty interesting. Last major construction gig (major fiber plant/network rework) I was on we had a crew like this. They basically hung back waiting for the construction crews to either lay cable or conduit, and they'd take measurements before they buried it.
I read it but I must have overlooked that part. Yeah, that would be a big problem if they're doing that. Definitely irresponsible. Perhaps they have too many grunts and not enough foremen on the job sites. That might account for it. Maybe.
Sounds like a nice town. I'd love to see one like that sometime. Buried everything must be very aesthetically pleasing.
Really, you need to prevent where possible, but hits are going to be common.
Yeah, it's expected. Really you can't dig in any industrialized city and not expect to hit something. That's just the way it works. Like we netadms always say, there's nothing better for finding buried fiber than a backhoe. Network went down? Blame it on a backhoe interrupt. :-)