Telco giants – no dry copper for you
The telcos control the copper in the ground – but did you know they control a lot of the copper in our public buildings. My experiences uncovered a significant amount of dry copper in our airports. The reason this became important for me, is because I was involved in offering a service, off site video surveillance recording for a food operator in McCarran airport. The airport wanted a lot of money to let the tenants have access to the fiber network. They also faced the issue of letting customers provide unique networks over one basic fiber back bone. Because of these issues we looked for another solution. Initially we thought about wifi, but the airport has may walls that are more than 6’ thick with concrete. No go for wifi with airport authorities also Now working in airports is best described at 15 minutes of work, and 2 hours of standing around getting permission for the person with the key and the ID to get the tech to the equipment.
Two airports – two very different approaches and results. In Las Vegas at McCarran Sprint managed the dry copper in the airport and they were happy to lease us dry copper. In Los Angeles at LAX SBC managed the copper in the airport, but they flat refused to lease out the dry copper without a trip to the CO. The reason they sent us to the CO is to effectively make it impossible to run DSL over the dry copper. The distance to the CO was to far away for the Ethernet over DSL to work in LAX. In stead of $15 per month for a dry copper strand they made us purchase 450 per month T1’s. In Vegas we got the dry copper. In the end the dry copper was as valuable to our customers as the surveillance services we provided.