atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Outside Plant OSP Construction Verizon: Dangling Fiber Splice Cases.

This has been a real sore spot. Over the years, a good number of the splice cases (I think that is what they are called) that Verizon installed to bring FIOS to this town have been breaking free and left dangling from the overhead cables. Often these cases are being held in place by plastic zip ties.

I've been trying to get Verizon to fix one such case that is now so low to the ground that I could jump up and pull the whole assembly down.

In the past, the tickets opened by Verizon customer service have been closed out with no action taken. I was told that the OSP group uses a different ticketing system, so, the electronic tickets get closed out and internal paper tickets are created for truck rolls.

I had the customer service rep open my latest ticket as a Hazcon to see if that gets someone to take care of the situation.

What a mess.

They are really nice zip ties though. They hold up cable all over the place.
Anyone you call in is just going to make a normal ticket for dispatch. See if your local PUC cares

I'm hoping that this person would, at least, try to get the point across to managers that this splice case is within reach. All it would take is one dishonest person with a hacksaw to cause an outage...and one headache for Verizon techs.

A shame that maintenance has gone from proactive to reactive.

City might be assholes about it too. Stopping for 30 minutes to put the splice back up gets a $2000 permit and $3000 traffic control plan.

In the past, rehangs of cases that I've encountered haven't had police assistance. To get an idea of the situation, Google 455 Summer Street Arlington Mass. Turn the image away from the house to see the street and how the case & tail loop used to look...not much better than what it looks like now.

Verizon is especially bad about sloppy OSP fiber plant. I've been many places in the country and Verizon takes the cake. For example, they use pre-terminated fiber drop cables to buildings from the terminal. If it's too long, they just roll up the slack and hang it at the pole. Multiply that by say, 20 drops feeding homes from an alley and you get my point. AT&T (and others) allow their installers to actually terminate the fiber drop wire in the field, yielding much less slack at the pole. I once assisted a Verizon technician performing a FiOS installation in Virginia. The drop was about 60 feet, with another 20 feet needed for routing down the building, etc. He only had a 250 foot cable on the truck, so he just slapped the excess up the pole and used cable ties to hang the coiled slack from the strand. He knew it was wrong, but he said that they didn't have any other lengths in stock at their shop. As for splice cases, they always have to leave enough slack so that the entire case can be brought inside a splicing vehicle. With that said, they often leave 100 feet+ of slack at the pole. They used to use "snow shoes" that were used along the strand to store this slack, but they don't even bother anymore. They take them down so often that they just roll up the slack and tie it to the nearest point of attachment they can find.

Outside plant, especially in the Bell System, used to be a work of art. They formed copper cables and splices to resemble the neatest plumbing. Not any more, that's for sure.

Having worked in a Central Office environment, I can appreciate using pre-terminated cables to make connections. It was rare for jumpers to be bad out of the package. Having said that, jumpers of varied lengths and terminations were kept in stock to reduce the chances of needing to store excess in overhead or underfloor cable troughs.

If I remember correctly, Tellabs ONTs have a compartment in the back to store excess slack. Seems like someone wasn't keeping an eye on inventory levels at that particular shop

At Global Crossing, we tried to avoid having excessive stock levels lying around, but, we had to have a selection of jumpers on hand to keep from being caught short. At Level 3, the primary OPS building I worked at stocked a much larger supply (simply because that office was much larger than the old GC office, and, jumpers were being run left & right for company as well as co-lo customer connections).

For this particular issue, I'll keep hounding Verizon with new tickets until the splice case and tail loop are taken care of.

In California we could only leave 15 feet at the pole and terminal and whenever we went from one side of the pole to the other. If there was a significant amount of drop left, we would leave it at the house. Takes like an hour for your boss to get the fusion machine to you, and another hour to finish the splice. That's a big chunk added to an already long job.

Yeah, police. I was complaining about that today because ConEd is installing a new transformer at a sub station here. Understandably they had to close the street where they are working and set up a detour which was clearly marked. They had a huge crane that you couldn't miss as well as barricades at each end of the work area.

So what I want to know is why they have to have a police car sitting at each end with lights flashing? Who requires it? It's a waste of police resources because they are useless and not needed. Besides that I abhor a police presence in places like this because it smacks of authoritarianism.

-Hal

For the case example in Massachusetts, just everything is wrong. PUC should care because that's too low. It was like someone took it down. And they didnt have any supplies to put it back up. You need like 20+ del tec ty wraps. The sno shoe needed two and then you need one every 20 inches and the case needs 2 long ones and two short ones. It's not just the case's fault for slipping, the cable should be supported by ty wraps the whole way out there.