The Build Impossible
By the PHANTOM
Man, and you think you got it tough? Me, I really got it tough, working in this ever-changing industry with no sense of how to deal with a haunt in their midst. But how about building an all-fiber system in a sparsely populated area where it is cold, lots of small villages, some with strange or no processes for permitting, strange or no processes for where utilities are located or even how home addresses are done? You have less than six months in a year to do construction, you have lots of tribes with their own customs and sacred sites that your guys can’t even look at when they fly over them. Lots of water, with frequent storms, can’t work or even fly over when the birds and caribou herds are migrating, sometimes can’t walk off land you’ve permitted. Did I mention cold? I guess you’ve figured out that it is remote and hard to get equipment and crews in and out. And you’re working with some of your own money and a bunch of government money. I wonder what Dan thinks.
The big metropolitan center is about half way down the Aleutian Island chain, a town with a population of 5,000, more or less. Getting there? There are air flights, albeit often unreliable. Road? What’s that? But by golly, GCI is building it! Those are some tough guys up there, able to roll with the punches and come away itching for the next challenge. If I had a hat it would be off to those admirable folks. But I don’t have a hat; will a baseball cap do if I put it on backwards? Oh, you can read about it at https://www.fiercetelecom.com/broadband/how-gci-navigating-fiber-alaskas-most-remote-communities.
I guess that the good folk who live there connect with the rest of the world through radio now. Don’t get me wrong: I love radio technology. One of the things that thrilled me the most about getting a haunting assignment in the 20th and 21st centuries was the chance to get to play with radios. I love studying and experimenting with the technology, talking (too much, they tell me), and listening. But when I need reliable, simple-to-use, high speed communications, I’ll take a good piece of fiber any time. Those folks up there are going to be blown out of the very cold water when they experience gigabits per second of fiber-delivered broadband!
The Haunt Unbelievable
As great as my haunting assignment has been, my cousin really got a plum assignment in the Big Apple. He’s been doing the play that tells the story of my last haunt, at the opera house in Paris. You may have heard of me from that haunt, they call it The Phantom of the Opera. Anyway, my cousin got the assignment to do the NYC version, not the real thing but pretty good. And he had worked steady for 35 years when it closed this year. Great job, cuz.
Got me to thinking, dangerous as that is, about how this industry has changed. When my cousin started the NYC assignment we were just discovering fiber optics cable. We knew it was gonna have a strong, some say profound, effect on how we did things in the industry, but we weren’t sure just how we would use it. But that low loss per kilometer was awfully impressive. So was the small size and the bandwidth. Would we send baseband video long distances, reducing the number of earth stations we needed? Could we take advantage of the bandwidth by frequency multiplexing multiple channels on one fiber? We didn’t have digital video back then, so no one thought about that. Might we use fiber to take video to the home, and if so, what would that look like?
But in true cable fashion, we took on the challenge. Yeah, we made some mistakes. So what? The road to every success is paved with mistakes made by the pioneers, and those mistakes are what success is built on. We persisted, and slowly found the formula that worked for us and our subscribers. We evolved from simple trunk replacement to ever-smaller nodes, to ways to take fiber to the home.
And now they are building an 800 mile long subsea fiber system way up north!
The Phantom
You never know when The “masked” Phantom is standing right beside you. Sometimes he is in a Zoom meeting or virtual SCTE training session with you. He may be hanging with the suits and other times with the front liners. But be assured, The Phantom knows all and, most importantly, The Phantom sees all!
Shutterstock editorial, Daniel Carnielli
