• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Company Provides Alaska Residents with Telephone, Cable Capabilities

Posted on: Monday, 3 March 2003, 06:00 CST

Company Provides Alaska Residents with Telephone, Cable Capabilities

Most people take their telephone's dial tone for granted. Richard Dowling thinks about his all the time.

Dowling, senior vice president of General Communication Inc. and a key architect of the company's telephone and cable networks, is one of a handful of GCI executives whose home telephones now get their dial tones through the same wire that provides cable television and high-speed Internet service.

Called "cable telephony" by those in the know, GCI has been working on the idea since 1996. That's when the company, which got its start as a long-distance phone service provider, broke into the cable business, buying three Alaska cable TV service providers for $280 million.

It was a bold bet on the future direction of the communications industry and the emerging technologies that blur the distinction between how phone calls, television programming and computer data are delivered to the home.

The idea was to create a single network that is capable of delivering all its services and open to future innovations in communications technology that will combine all three.

Much of the work required to make the cable phone service possible was done when GCI upgraded the cable network to deliver high-speed Internet service and digital cable TV.

When GCI bought the cable systems, they for the most part could carry signals in only one direction: from the cable company to the customer. The upgrades converted the one-way network into a two-way network and increased its carrying capacity with fiber optics, creating what is known in the industry as a hybrid fiber-coax network.

A little more than a year ago, with that framework in place, GCI engineers began in earnest to develop the platform that ties the cable system to its local telephone network, experimenting with different pieces of hardware and software until they settled on a combination that best suited their needs.

In mid-December, Dowling's home was the first to be connected, followed soon after by GCI chief executive Ron Duncan's and a few other GCI employees. In all, GCI in the next couple of months plans to have roughly 40 people using the system full-time, mostly GCI employees, all in the Sand Lake area.

They'll use their personal experiences with the new system to work out any bugs. At this time next year, GCI plans to start switching its local phone service customers in Anchorage over to the cable system.

And barring a few glitches early on, so far so good, according to Dowling.

"I'm a convert," he said. "I wouldn't go back."

By the end of 2004, GCI is aiming to connect as many as 10,000 of its 83,000 local phone lines in Anchorage to the new system.

GCI estimates its cable network passes roughly 90 percent of all the homes in Alaska. In Anchorage, that estimate is nearer 98 percent.

Given the breadth of its coverage, GCI's cable network will play an increasingly important role in the company's local telephone service business moving forward, according to Dowling.

"Some customers will continue to be served by other technologies, but the preponderance of our residential service will be on cable," he said.

GCI has spent about $1.5 million evaluating the technology over the past few years and expects to spend about $30 million to deploy it over the next five years. The actual costs could be lower, however, if the price of the equipment falls as the manufacturers move to higher production volumes, Dowling said.

Using cable networks to carry telephone calls is a relatively new idea, but one that's proven itself. Cable telephony was introduced in the United States during the late 1990s and industry analysts estimate that more than 2 million U.S. households and businesses had signed up for the service as of mid-2002. Comcast, Cox Communications and RCN are among the largest cable phone service providers.

The main difference between a cable telephone phone network and a traditional one is the physical connection -- called the "local loop" -- from the subscriber's phone to the central location where the carrier houses the switches and other equipment used to route calls to and from their destinations.

As in most places, the local loop in Anchorage is mostly comprised of twisted pairs of copper wires that run from a main line near the road to a box on the side of the house. From that box, called a network interface device, the pair of wires is connected to each phone jack inside. This has been the basic local-phone scheme for the past 100 years.

Alaska Communications Systems, the state's dominant local phone service provider, owns the local loop in Anchorage and is required by law to give GCI and other competing carriers access to it at rates regulated by a state commission.

In Anchorage, if GCI is your local phone company, your calls probably travel on ACS' local loop to a remote switch, where they are transferred to a GCI-owned fiber-optic cable that carries them to GCI's central office. There, they are routed through GCI's equipment. Calls to a friend across town go back out on ACS's local loop. Long-distance calls travel on GCI's fiber-optic cable.

When GCI customers want to initiate new service or make changes to their existing lines that require wiring between the home and the local loop, ACS is the company responsible for making the service call. GCI, which has captured some 40 percent of ACS' local telephone customers in Anchorage since it began offering local phone service in 1997, has long complained that ACS discriminates against its customers.

By moving its customers off ACS' local loop and onto its own cable network, GCI is aiming in part to eliminate some of the problems the company says have stemmed from its reliance on ACS when their customers want to initiate new service or make changes to their existing lines.

We can provide them our service without having to go through another company," Dowling said.

From the customer's point of view, GCI will install a second network interface device, about the size of a large shoe box, next to the one that's already there on the side of their home or building.

Those units split the separate signals transmitted on the same coaxial cable and send them to the appropriate receiver inside the house -- the telephone, TV or computer.

The network interface devices GCI has chosen for its network have connections built into them for four separate phone lines, each of which can be activated remotely by computer, eliminating the need for a technician to visit the home to install additional lines to the house from the local loop.

The whole process of changing a home phone line over to the cable telephony system should take about an hour, according to Dowling. "Our goal is to make it a non-event for the customer," he said.

By and large, the major U.S. cable telephone service providers that have used an architecture similar to the one GCI is developing have been able to deliver service on par with that delivered over traditional local loops, according to Charles Golvin, senior telecommunications analyst at Forrester Research in San Francisco.

"It's the same technology, basically, as the one the telephone companies use to carry voice traffic," Golvin said. "The only difference is that instead of going over the twisted copper pair that runs to your house, they're running through a coax cable. Fundamentally, it's the same thing."

What sets GCI apart from its counterparts offering cable phone service in the Lower 48, however, is its roots as a phone service provider.

GCI was founded in 1979 as a long-distance telephone company. It began offering local phone service in Anchorage in 1997 after a change in the federal rules governing competition, and it now commands some 40 percent of the city's local phone service market share.

The company launched local service in Fairbanks in 2001 and in Juneau last year.

That background puts GCI in a distinctive position among its cable telephony peers, most of which are using the technology as a way to provide a new service to their existing cable TV and Internet service customers.

"GCI has had the benefit of sitting back and watching all of their cable brethren work through the bugs," said Liam Burke, a telecom analyst at investment banking firm Ferris, Baker Watts in Baltimore.

"Plus, these guys are established phone network providers," Burke added. "They were in the long-distance business originally, and that gives them a different perspective that I think works to their advantage."

One of the biggest challenges early entrants into the cable telephony game faced was convincing people that a cable phone network would be as reliable as the twisted-pair network. Local phone companies challenged by cable telephone providers often tout their networks as having "five nines" reliability, meaning they're up and running 99.999 percent of the time.

Wes Carson, ACS president and chief operating officer, said his company welcomes GCI's plans to introduce cable telephony because doing so is consistent with the spirit of the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was to give customers a real choice for local service.

Like his counterparts, however, Carson stressed the proven, five nines reliability of his company's network. "If someone wants to make a lower-quality service their choice based on price, then we've got real differentiation," he said.

Although he has not spoken with anyone at ACS, Burke, a long-time telecommunications industry watcher, said many executives of other local phone companies he speaks with are beginning to recognize the threat.

"I'm a telephone guy, and nothing is more five-nines reliable than local dial tone, so I had been skeptical of this kind of service," Burke said. "But I've had a lot of discussions with telephone company people, and they understand that cable is a very real, very viable alternative to traditional local service," Burke said.

Dowling, 59, has been with GCI since the beginning, serving for many years as head of engineering and playing a key role in the construction of the company's network infrastructure.

Since it was a phone service provider first, Dowling said, network reliability has been the mantra for GCI's network engineers from the start, and it was a guiding principle in the design of the cable telephone network.

"The telephone industry tends to be a lot more conservative and a lot more focused on making things always available, and we came at it from that point of view," he said. "When there's any kind of outage, it rings the bell around here and it's all hands figuring out what to do next. The cable industry, as a whole, has had a probably deserved reputation on being less focused on that level of availability."

Some of the reliability issues are mandatory. Government regulations require telephone service to be invulnerable to electrical failures, and GCI is putting in place a battery backup system that will keep the system running for eight hours in the event of a blackout.

And since GCI already had a phone network and a solid base of customers, the company approached the design of its cable telephony platform with an aim to improve the delivery of its local phone service. It won't market "cable telephone" as a separate service, and customers who switch will see no change in the way their existing telephone or cable TV service works, according to Dowling.

"From the consumer's point of view, it should be completely transparent," he said.

Customers won't see any difference in its initial phases, but GCI's plan to pipe all three of its service offerings -- voice, video and data -- through one line clears a path for more advanced communications services that combine all three.

GCI's cable telephone system initially will use the same circuit-switching technology that has been in use in telephone networks for the past 100 years. Under such systems, each phone call has a dedicated, end-to-end connection for its duration.

While still in the development and testing phases, the telecommunications industry has been moving toward providing voice services that take advantage of Internet protocol, or IP, technology.

On an IP network, information is broken up into pieces, called packets, which then find their way to their destination by the most efficient path, best using the network resources available at any given instant.

Such systems are more cost efficient because they take advantage of pauses in conversations, compared with circuit-switched networks that tie up an entire line whether or not any information is being exchanged.

Voice-over-IP, as it is called, also promises integrated services that are not currently possible. For example, it could be used to provide "click through" dialing, where phone calls are made by clicking on a Web-page link. Other scenarios would include Web-based voicemail, and more advanced call-waiting features.

GCI is developing its cable telephone network with an eye toward voice-over-IP, but the technology still needs to be refined, and those kinds of services probably won't be common for another five years, according to Dowling.

"The real interesting developments will be in the way that consumers use the network going forward, and this architecture gives us the ability to bring those things in at such time as they become mature enough and people want them," he said.

-----

To see more of the Anchorage Daily News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.adn.com

(c) 2003, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

GNCMA, CMCSK, COX, RCNC

----

The best of science, space, and technology from RedNova

More News in this Category