GRAPEVINE – Verizon Communications is betting billions of dollars that glass fiber thinner than a human hair can remake a century-old telephone system into an ultrafast network that can zip high-definition TV signals and large data files alongside plain-old telephone calls.
That's why Ira Ramsey and Fritz Wolz have been clocking up to 80-hour weeks for the last several months. They're foot soldiers in an army of technicians rapidly pushing Verizon's high-speed network from its initial launch in Keller to other northeast Tarrant County cities and then across the nation.
"To put these two fibers together and fuse them with light, I say that's neat," said Mr. Ramsey, who was sitting curbside the other day splicing the wisps of fiber.
After years of anticipation and false starts, Verizon this year embarked on one of the most far-reaching upgrades ever undertaken by a telephone company. The fiber it's laying carries information on light pulses and theoretically has unlimited capacity. The new wiring will eventually replace copper wires that, in some cases, have been in the ground for decades.
For phone customers, fiber will bring high-definition TV signals and 30 megabits-a-second data, not to mention standard telephone service – far beyond the capacity of 100-year-old copper. In Tarrant County, Verizon's basic 5 megabits a second "Fios" fiber package starts at $35 a month and runs up to $200 for 30 megabits.
As early as today, New York-based Verizon plans to announce an expansion of the fiber upgrade into several East Coast cities. Its plans call for spending $800 million this year to cover 1 million homes. It will cover another 2 million homes next year. Verizon lines run to about 32 million homes.
The company is widely expected to begin work in Dallas-area suburbs such as Plano, Irving and Lewisville next year.
Executives are also expected to talk today about the impact the project is having on Verizon's hiring plans. In North Texas alone, the company says it's hiring 300 workers by the end of the year. It has already brought in dozens of workers from as close as College Station and as far as Wisconsin.
Verizon may be taking a big risk in pouring billions into fiber, but some experts say it could be in worse shape if it did nothing. Local-phone companies have been losing phone lines at a rate of 4 percent a year for the last four years, a pace that is expected to leap as cable companies start selling phone service.
"It's like change or die," said Albert Lin, an analyst with American Technology Research in San Francisco. "They rose to fame by replacing the telegraph and carrier pigeon, and now they are going to have to face the onslaught of today's equivalent of the telephone."
Verizon has been the most aggressive of the nation's four local-phone giants in deploying fiber. It's taking fiber all the way to customers' homes, which on average costs more than $1,000 a house.
"It's a total transformation," said Paul Lacouture, president of Verizon's Network Services group.
SBC's plans
By contrast, SBC Communications Inc. says it will take fiber to within 3,000 feet of homes, leaving copper wire in place for the last leg of the connection. The company says it, too, will go to the home eventually, but its current approach will bring faster service to more homes sooner.
"We don't disagree with Verizon on the end goal," said Ernie Carey, SBC's vice president of network. "What we have a divergence on is how you get there and at over what period of time."
On Wednesday, San Antonio-based SBC awarded Alcatel a $1.7 billion, five-year contract to supply the equipment for its plan to bring fiber to 18 million homes.
Mr. Lacouture said he respects SBC, but Verizon wanted to do one thorough upgrade rather than several incremental ones.
"We didn't want to be limited in any way on the bandwidth side," he said. "Three years ago people would say 1.5 [megabits a second] is fine. And now everyone is saying 3 megabits is not enough."
The company's plan appears to be winning customers.
Verizon, which has 800,000 phone customers in North Texas, won't say how many Fios customers it has signed up in Keller, a town of 16,000 homes. But the company has said it's been adding 50 customers a day since late August. That would mean Verizon has signed up about 2,500 homes, or 15 percent of Keller.
This is even before the company has started selling video service, which it plans to do before the end of June. In Grapevine, Southlake and other suburbs, it's starting to sell voice and data service in neighborhoods where construction and testing are complete.
When customers order the service, Verizon technicians are dispatched to bring fiber from the curb up to homes and hook up equipment on the outside and inside of houses.
That process can take up to two days. Several customers who have the service said they were willing to put up with that.
Steve Krog, a network administrator for area schools, switched to Verizon's 15-megabit Fios service from his cable modem about a month ago. He has seen a marked improvement in his connections to servers at work and during online-gaming sessions.
He even forked over $10 a month more than what he was paying for cable modem, because the connection was three times as fast. "It wasn't bad with the Charter, but I was surprised to see a difference when I switched."
Some concern
Fiber may be getting rave reviews, but some consumer advocates worry that sweet deal may not last.
They say that Verizon and SBC are only now investing in fiber after promising it for years. The investments were prompted in part by a string of regulatory and court rulings that reduced the companies' obligations to share their networks with rivals such as AT&T and MCI.
Those decisions mean that the phone and cable companies will have few other competitors in the new high-speed world, said Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America. With only one other significant competitor, the companies will become complacent in cutting prices or adding new services.
"They haven't shown a lot of inclination to compete," he said. "So, they will get very cozy in the end."
Phone and cable officials disagree.
"Competition ... has made us more astute and put us more on our toes since we have been competing with satellite and others," said Anita Lamont, a spokeswoman for Charter Communications.
Verizon managers say they are testing and pushing new technology to get every advantage over cable they can. In the company's Keller central office, workers have cleared out space for video equipment and are receiving new fiber gear every day, said Robert McGee, an area network operations manager.
Phone and cable officials disagree.
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