isen.blog

Amazing what you can see by looking! Yesterday out my window a woman in the bucket of a bucket truck was pulling a black cable about the diameter of a finger. I rushed outside to watch. The bucket was raised to the bottom tier of the wires that ran down my street. The truck drove along at a fast walk, pulling the cable. It took her (and her driver) just a few minutes to pull maybe 200 hundred meters over a dozen poles and through half a dozen trees.

"Is that fiber?" I asked. "Yes," she said. "Is this the Verizon FIOS project?" Yes. I watched in fascination.

When the truck disappeared around the corner, I walked down to the other end of the pull; the workers there showed me the cable, a 144-fiber Sumitomo cable marked 18,858 feet, 18,860 feet, 18,862 feet. They said it would terminate at a box at the corner of Berge and Orchard. They didn't know much about the overall network architecture. They said the cable would carry phone service, Internet and TV. "TV will come later." They thought service would begin in a few months. "Sign me up!" I said.

Now the bucket truck was coming back the other way. The woman in the bucket was running a machine with a rotating thing inside that lashed the new cable to an old one with metal piano-wire-like stuff. Every time she'd come to a pole or a bump in the cable, she'd take the lasher off, lash it by hand and set up the lasher on the other side. It was skilled, busy work; she was good at it and fast too.

Four cops were standing around, assigned to direct traffic around the project. Then there was the bucket truck driver and me. Six guys standing around, one woman working her butt off. I had to laugh.

An hour later the installation crew and the cops were gone, and I was back at work. The fiber was on the poles.

Verizon's FIOS is likely to be a mixed blessing. Reportedly FIOS will start at 2 megabits per second, pretty good, maybe equivalent to Cablevision's speed, but probably not a huge improvement. On the one hand I am happy that Verizon will one-up Continental Cablevision, a company that recently blocked me from using the email provider of my choice. On the other hand, I am leery that once FIOS is established, Verizon will abandon its common carrier heritage, and start tying verticalized services to its infrastructure, and start blocking ports to prevent me from using the VOIP carrier and email provider I want. (The Supreme Court's Brand X decision will be a critical determiner here!) Also, when the next increment in speed comes due, Verizon's passive optical network (PON) architecture will fall behind; it will not be easy to upgrade.

The history of the American West is divided into two eras, Before the Wire and after. Barbed wire ended the era of the free range. After the Wire everything changed; ranches and roads appeared. grazing rights and ownership disputes sprang up. But the very day after they unrolled a strand and stapled it to a few fence posts, the change mustn't have seemed all that profound. I wonder if yesterday wasn't that kind of day.