Copyright 2000 The Hartford Courant Company
THE
HARTFORD COURANT
July 4, 2000 Tuesday, 5 WEST
HARTFORD/NORTHWEST CONNECTICUT
SECTION: TOWN NEWS;
Pg. B1
LENGTH: 946 words
HEADLINE: FIBER OPTIC LINES COMING;
CHUNK OF STATE
BEING AFFECTED
BYLINE: BRYAN ROURKE; Courant Staff
Writer
BODY:
Charles H. Palmer has seen the future.
A few weeks ago, it came within 40 feet of his front door in the form of a thin
fiber optic cable.
Along Route 44 in eastern Connecticut and in other
places across the middle portion of the state, new fiber optic lines are being
laid under roads and along utility poles in a worldwide race to offer broadband
technology to businesses and consumers. Palmer, who lives along Route 44 in
Ashford, is taking the disruption in stride.
"It will be good," he said,
"but right now, it's a pain in the neck."
Fiber optic lines allow for
broadband transmission. Broadband refers to a broad frequency spectrum that is
passed through thin strands of glass fiber. The signals can transmit large
quantities of data, voice and video data.
"Broadband will make the
information superhighway of today seem like a goat path," said Rock Regan, chief
information officer for the state Department of Information Technology.
Broadband can transmit a trillion bits of data per second on a single
strand of hair-width glass. That's 200 times faster than what's now available.
The new technology is expected to allow consumers to download movies in minutes
and enable businesses to make regular use of computer-based videoconferencing.
"People are tired of sitting waiting for downloads," said Bob Hafner,
vice president of the Gartner Group in Stamford, which provides research and
advisory services for the information technology industry. "Broadband provides
information quicker, and time is money."
The advent of broadband
technology has generated some trench warfare. Several service carriers are
spending billions of dollars to bury lines to create the new networks.
"There's been an explosion of upgrading the older technology and putting
in new technology to provide larger and larger amounts of bandwidth," Hafner
said. "I've lost track of the number of trans-Atlantic projects. Companies are
wiring the world with fiber."
In Connecticut, more than a dozen
companies are laying fiber optic lines. Some are telephone companies, such as
AT&T and SNET. Others are cable companies, such as Cox Communications and
Cablevision Inc.
"That's why you see cable companies advertising
telephone service now," said Beryl Lyons, spokeswoman for the state Department
of Public Utility Control. "It's because they've put in fiber optics. And you
will see more and more of this."
Fiber optics projects are under way in
Coventry, Bolton, Manchester, East Hartford, West Hartford, Farmington, Bristol,
Plymouth, Thomaston, Watertown, Woodbury, Roxbury, Bridgewater, Brookfield,
Newtown, Bethel and Redding. And among the roads that have been affected are
Routes 6, 44, 502, 317, 67, 25 and 133.
Typically what you see are road
crews installing several different colored rubber pipes through which fiber
optic wires will be snaked.
The company laying lines outside Palmer's
door in Ashford is Level 3 Communications of Broomfield, Colo., which is
spending $3 billion to build a nationwide telecommunications network. The
2-year-old company wants to offer broadband capabilities to Internet service
providers such as America Online and Yahoo, which will then offer the service to
customers for fees ranging from $40 to $200 a month.
"It is expensive,"
said Maribel Lopez, an analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., a
technology research company. "But it's largely unavailable."
Widespread
public availability of broadband is believed to be at least a few years away.
But some businesses aren't willing to wait.
"If they can't buy the
service, they'll build it themselves," Lopez said.
So you've got some
companies laying lines for themselves, some doing so for a statewide network,
and some doing so for a nationwide network.
"There are places where
there are two or three companies working on the same road," said Joy L. Burris,
spokeswoman for Level 3 Communications.
In Connecticut and a dozen other
states in the Midwest and Southwest, SNET and its parent company, SBC
Communications, is spending $6 billion to lay fiber optic line along existing
utility poles. By the end of this year in Connecticut alone, SNET will have laid
nearly half a million miles of fiber optic lines.
"We are very
aggressively adding fiber optic lines," said Beverly Levy, a company
spokeswoman. "We are working on getting them closer to customers."
The
Gartner Group reports that roughly 3 percent of Internet users now access it via
broadband. Four years from now, it will be about 40 percent.
"It is a
race to see who can lay down the most wire and get the infrastructure to get a
toehold in your kitchen or home office," said Nuala Forde, a spokeswoman for the
state Department of Information Technology.
Several of the private
companies are using roadways to create broadband infrastructure, which is
allowed by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
"Infrastructure is considered to be in the national interest," said Jack
R. Goldberg, commissioner of the state Department of Public Utility Control.
"Congress says it must be allowed."
As a result, roads, which in some
places may have been recently repaved, are being torn up to allow the cables to
be buried.
With so many companies competing to create fiber optic
networks, it might appear the marketplace will be saturated. But no one in
telecommunications thinks that.
Level 3 is installing a dozen conduit
pipes for fiber optic wires, but putting only one protective pipe system to use,
and saving the others for future expansion.
"Pent-up demand is pretty
great," Hafner said. "We haven't seen anyone say 'I built bandwidth and no one
wants to buy it.' "
LOAD-DATE: July 6, 2000
