OSP Expo: Verizon’s Nogay Touts FiOS Performance

Leaving no doubt that Verizon believes the decision to take fiber all the way to the home was the right one, Claire Beth Nogay, senior vice president and chief network officer of Verizon Telecom, said today from the OSP Expo in Baltimore that the performance of the network is driving the success of FiOS.

“It’s been five years since we made the decision to deploy FTTH ... and we have not taken our foot off the pedal one bit,” she said. Verizon anticipates feeding 12.5 million homes with fiber by the end of the year, most of which are multiple dwelling units.

In New York City where it finally won approval, 61.1 percent of the 3.1 million households it serves with fiber across five boroughs are in MDUs. Verizon’s New York City-build plan will take six years.

Nogay’s job is to figure out how to make that deployment faster and cheaper all the time. She said she has been able to accomplish that primarily through the use of new engineering and planning tools.

Nogay also said it was her job to help video service deployments catch up to the fiber deployments. The company expects to have 9.8 million homes enabled for video by the end of the year.

Verizon has built a geospatial engineering and planning platform that integrates with outside plant application and has been able to accelerate its deployment time by reducing the time it takes to plan and do a cost analysis for a particular market.

“Across the company there were no definitive planning standards,” she said. “Over time, local engineering teams began to develop and adapt with tools, including geospatial tools.”

One of the biggest obstacles Verizon’s platform had to overcome was the address inventory and how to distinguish consumers form small businesses and tie them to rate centers and tax boundaries and more. Then it had to link those addresses with maps and existing plant locations. The platform reduced the cost of planning by two-thirds.

“It didn’t take my engineers long to see the value in this technology,” Nogay said. Once Verizon gets into a market they need to move fast before the competition knows they’re there.

“If we take forever to do the work we lose a great opportunity,” she said.

Nogay reiterated that quality was an important criterion in Verizon’s video play. She said the company had contracted with JDSU to provide solutions that would allow the carrier to monitor the RF video signal at the edge of the network.

“Video quality is crucial, but it’s difficult because there are so many areas of the network where video quality can be compromised,” Nogay said. “We have 100 HD channels and take pride in the quality. We’ve set the bar high and it’s a challenge to maintain.”

Asked if Verizon had plans to wholesale video services, Nogay said not at this time.