Touting FTTP in Northeast, Verizon to hire up to 5000

Oct 21, 2004 12:00 PM, By Ed Gubbins

Verizon Communications made its first announcement of fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) markets in its Northeast footprint today after the first three this summer from former GTE territory in Texas, California and Florida. In the process, the company predicted it will hire 3000 to 5000 new employees by the end of next year to assist deployment.

Verizon announced the following new locations targeted for FTTP deployment:

·        Parts of Riverside, Orange and San Bernardino counties in California

·        Parts of Delaware

·        Parts of Hillsborough and Pasco counties in Florida

·        Parts of Montgomery County in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area in Maryland

·        Parts of Essex and Middlesex counties in Massachusetts

·        Parts of Nassau, Rockland and Westchester counties in New York

·        Parts of Bucks and Chester counties in Pennsylvania

·        Parts of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in Texas

·        Parts of Arlington, Fairfax and Loudoun counties and the communities of Falls Church, Leesburg and Herndon in Virginia

Though some analysts had the expectation beforehand and the perception afterward that today’s announcement was an acceleration of Verizon’s FTTP deployment, the company reiterated today its previously stated goal of passing 1 million premises by the end of this year and 2 million more by the end of 2005, with a rollout of video services next year.

Today’s announcement is the first to name FTTP towns in the former Bell Atlantic territory rather than former GTE territory. Though Verizon has been pursuing FTTP deployment in the Northeast for months, Paul Lacouture, president of Verizon's network services group, said Verizon was able to announce FTTP deployment there now thanks to a recent clarification from the Federal Communications Commission regarding unbundling rules for fiber access networks as they pertain to 271 regulations for providing service outside a regional Bell carrier’s local franchise territory.

“The 271 regulations didn’t apply in the former GTE states, therefore we were able to go there without the question,” Lacouture said. “We were pretty certain we’d be able to do fiber in the former Bell Atlantic states, but we had to get clarification from the FCC about the 271 rule. They’ve recently done that, so we’re very confident we have the right regulatory rules to go ahead and deploy this without worry of having to unbundle or give away this investment.”

However, an FCC spokesman told Telephony today that the clarification is not yet official. The FCC is generally expected to release a decision on the issue late Friday, the spokesman said.

Days after SBC Communication touted its own DSL-based fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) initiative LightSpeed, Verizon emphasized perceived advantages of fiber compared with the copper infrastructure employed by DSL: faster bandwidth speeds, greater reliability in wet weather, less day-to-day maintenance and quicker repair times. However, John Celentano, president of Skyline Marketing Group, disputed the notion that FTTP entails less maintenance than FTTN, pointing out that FTTP’s passive architecture requires customer premises equipment that is powered at the home.

In addition, Verizon said it is designing 40 new operations support systems to handle electronic order processing and remotely diagnose and correct network problems.