Carrier follows utilities with fiber
stephen hardy
A New England carrier`s carrier has inaugurated service on a fiber network built in partnership with local electric utility companies. The company`s experiences highlight some of the technical and legal issues carriers may face when forging alliances with regulated public utilities. Meanwhile, observers say the network represents a harbinger of the future role electric utilities will play in the communications marketplace.
As reported last year, FiveCom Inc., a carrier`s carrier based in Waltham, MA, began construction of the New England Optical Network (neon) with an eye toward providing capacity to reach cities and towns outside the metropolitan Boston area (see Lightwave, March 1996, page 1). The company currently plans to extend neon from southern Connecticut, through central Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and to southern Maine--a total of 475 miles (see figure on page 21). Four links, representing 180 route-miles, are currently built and operational: Hartford, CT, to Springfield, MA; Nashua, NH, to Manchester, NH; Manchester to Dover, NH; and Dover to Portland, ME.
According to Victor Colantonio, FiveCom`s president, the rest of the network should be in place by the last quarter of 1998, at a cost of $33 million. The company envisions adding spurs to reach the Connecticut cities of Stamford, Danbury, and Waterbury at a cost of $10 million to $12 million, while an additional route from the backbone through Merrimack, NH, to Durham, NH, is also under consideration.
The key to building neon quickly and economically resides in the company`s alliances with several public utilities, says Colantonio. "We just don`t have to negotiate with each community for the placement of the wire under the ground or on the utility pole. All of those land rights are already preassembled, as is the infrastructure," he says. "So our cost to build is a lot less than if we were to attempt to construct an entirely new system." This infrastructure includes the transmission and distribution systems, underground manholes, conduits, and building entrances. Electric utilities also range beyond the routes normally followed by mainstream communications pipelines, allowing FiveCom to position itself as a supplier of redundant capacity that could meet emergency needs.
The ubiquity of electric utilities clinches the deal. "They serve anybody with a lightbulb," explains Colantonio. "As a result, we can serve anyone with a lightbulb."
The decision to team with utilities came after research into other avenues for rights-of-way. "If we could find a rail line that did it as well and as inexpensively, we`d be talking to railroads. Or if we could find a gas company that had vacant gas pipes that connected the endpoints economically, we`d be talking to gas companies," asserts Colantonio. However, FiveCom determined that the limited point-to-point rights-of-way provided by railroads constrained the company`s expansion potential, while gas companies generally did not reach all the communities the company wanted to serve. Thus, adds Colantonio, FiveCom concluded that electric utilities "provide a higher-quality right-of-way that meets our needs at a lower cost."
Stringing fiber along
Having determined that electrical utilities were the way to go, FiveCom and its new partners had to determine how to integrate fiber into the existing electrical infrastructure. The company chose separate strategies for above- and below-ground applications. Above ground, FiveCom chose to adapt optical phase ground wire, which is normally used to provide lightning protection atop utility poles, to carry 60- to 96-fiber strands. The wire retains its standard diameter, weight, and basic structure, and the fiber runs through the center of the cable. focas, in Alpharetta, GA, performs the integration, using both basic singlemode and TrueWave dispersion-shifted fiber from Lucent Technologies, Atlanta, GA.
In underground applications, neon will use all-dielectric cable, another pre-existing piece of infrastructure, specially adapted by Lucent Fitel, Carrollton, GA, a joint partnership between Lucent Technologies and Furukawa. Whether in the ground or strung from pole to pole, the fiber-adapted cable will be installed during routine maintenance or, where necessary, as a "custom" installation to accommodate FiveCom`s requirements.
The percentage of singlemode and TrueWave fiber in each cable will depend upon anticipated customer requirements, says Colantonio. For example, the higher-capacity TrueWave fiber will predominate in the Springfield to Nashua link, while singlemode strands will be more plentiful in the connection from Nashua to Manchester.
Colantonio reveals that neon will initially operate at OC-48 2.5-Gbit/sec speeds, with Lucent Technologies the vendor of choice for terminal equipment. However, the network will be capable of future upgrade to OC-192 10-Gbit/sec rates, he says.
Although working with electric utilities provided several benefits, FiveCom`s choice of partners also created some unique problems. For example, state agencies charged with overseeing public utilities often did not know what to make of such alliances; similarly, other agencies were unclear about FiveCom`s role in the communications marketplace and its relationship with regulated carriers. Tiptoeing around these state watchdogs has sometimes proved difficult, according to Colantonio.
"Our corporate mission is to provide carriage to certificated carriers," he explains. "So we serve the carriers that serve the public. We do not have any relationship with the general public--we don`t have a consumer product, and we don`t sell retail. And that has been a particularly difficult distinction to have regulators grasp quickly."
But convincing regulators that such a distinction exists is essential for the company`s business strategy. "We want to have the flexibility from the regulators to remain an interstate carrier, serving only certificated entities--in other words, companies that they already regulate. And our argument has been that since you already regulate all of our customers, there`s no need to regulate us," he says. These discussions usually take months, according to Colantonio, but so far the company has prevailed.
Future omens
FiveCom`s experiences will likely be repeated by other communications companies and by electric utilities themselves, according to Jerry Hobbs, an analyst at Kessler Marketing Intelligence Corp., Newport, RI. "I`d say that more utilities are going to be visible than we had thought of in the past, especially in the coming year," he predicts.
Hobbs pointed to other alliances, such as a recently announced partnership between mci and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which exemplifies the burgeoning influence of electric utilities on communications provisioning. In fact, Hobbs foresees some utilities becoming direct competitors with existing communications carriers. These utilities will take advantage of the strengths outlined by Colantonio, he says, adding, "The electric companies also have the unique position of already having existing customers, both business and residential, that have a bill-paying history. And so they have a great list of people who have revenues that paid their bills, so they know what`s a good company and what`s not."
Hobbs cites Southern Co., which serves the southeastern United States, as a utility that has positioned itself as a future source for communications. The company has exchanged rights-of-way with communications companies in exchange for access to fiber. In essence, the company has encouraged these carriers to construct a fiber network for the utility, which, in turn, could use that capacity in competition with the carriers. Hobbs says other energy firms worth watching include Entergy, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Central and Southwest.
Given that electric utilities reach "anybody with a lightbulb," will they take a vanguard role in efforts to bring fiber to the home or curb? Don`t count on it, says Hobbs.
"If you look at the last mile, electric utilities are always going to have an electrical conduit, a wire or whatever it happens to be, because fiber is inefficient for delivering power--at least in this day and age," he explains. q