Fl. County Halts FTTP Until Installation Is Safer 468
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."
HTTP installation?!? (Score:1, Interesting)
I mean, viruses and email scams are dangerous and all, but there's really no reason to panic.
-HJ
Used to work for Verizon... (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Wisdom sorely lacking (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Sounds like the work of lawyers and lobyists (Score:4, Interesting)
This sounds to me like a complaint of a competitor desperately trying to stop progress.
Re:Dear gods, its just an optical cable! (Score:3, Interesting)
UTOPIA and iProvo (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Low Bid Contractors (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Sounds like the work of lawyers and lobyists (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What does this have to do with fiber, exactly? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:That's why... (Score:2, Interesting)
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!
To whomever modded the parent as flamebait... (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Is it Really Verizon's Fault? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Wow, thats crazy (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:201st sinkhole! 202nd sewage geyser! (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:WTF? You RTFA?!! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:201st sinkhole! 202nd sewage geyser! (Score:3, Interesting)
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. :-)