| reply to bigdaddy
It's Offical ! »www.fiercetelecom.com/story/veri···11-08-12
Replacing copper with fiber
Another area where Verizon believes it can possibly reduce costs is to shut down its aging copper network and move customers onto fiber where it has gained decent FiOS penetration.
Last year, the service provider migrated a number of its customers in Bartonsville, Texas off the existing copper network and onto fiber.
"It was a neighborhood that had more than 50 percent penetration so it made financial sense to connect the ONT to the home and delete the copper network," Shammo said, adding that they are "doing a trial in Florida in another community."
Outside of Texas, Verizon is now researching how it could make a similar copper to fiber transition in Wesley Chapel, Fla., a rural town outside Tampa.
Regardless of its progress in replacing copper with fiber, Shammo is quick to point out that the real cost challenge with deploying FTTH is not the equipment, but actually the man hours it takes to connect a subscriber to the network.
"Because it takes an employee--it's the hourly salary of that employee that gets capitalized for connecting up that home," he said. "That's really the intensive capital nature of the connection. It's not the hardware." |
