No, specifically he was talking about IOF (Inter-Office Facility). Best
place to see this is Page 56-57, lines 56.12 through 57.17. Testimony
of Mr. Albert, being cross examined by Nick Whichester of Mid-Maine:
MR. ALBERT:
12 .... The interrogatory that was asked was of your fiber
13 systems, how many of them are configured completely with the
14 full fiber route in the survivable fashion. Our response to
15 that interrogatory is, of all our IOF system, 10 percent of
16 them are completely configured that way. The other 90 have
17 got some portion of overlap.
18 MR. WINCHESTER: Collapsed network, collapsed
19 ring?
20 MR. ALBERT: Some portion of the routing is a
21 collapsed ring. That might only just be a section. It
22 might only be, you know, 10,000 feet, but some portion of
23 them are collapsed rings. When you look at our maintenance
24 spare quantities for IOF, they are nowhere near, you know,
25 what you would need to throw every single working OC-48 that
1 we've got out there in the network. We've got 192 OC-48s in
2 Maine. There was one interrogatory we answered with the
3 snapshot count. With the quantities that we have,
4 maintenance spares for IOF, we still don't have the ability
5 when there is a failure to reroute on a fiber basis
The upshot as I understand it is that Verizon in Maine responds to fiber
cuts by a very manual process of finding the engineer responsible for
the region, having an engineer go into the office, consult a number of
paper maps and then figure out an alternate route. They then dispatch
technicians to the various COes to string jumpers to route around the
outage. This process is described in the testimony.
The document makes fascinating reading and is available off the Maine
PUC web site under the "transcripts" section
(http://www.state.me.us/mpuc/misctranscripts/2002-243%20080503.htm).
As I said before, I don't think Maine is unique to Verizon nor Verizon
unique to RBOCs. I think the fact that some of you find the above
information news is fascinating in and of itself...
regards,
fletcher