With aging infrastructure, Verizon has trouble on the line

NORFOLK

Alex Long stopped his bucket truck in front of a thicket of trees and shrubs off Burksdale Road.

The branches there had worn through a telephone cable, exposing the copper wires to rain and harsh weather. Long, a cable splicer for Verizon Communications Inc. for 22 years, knew the cable well, having responded to multiple "trouble" calls from customers in that area.

"When we come to this area, we dread it," he said.

One morning last week, he looked at the cable on his way to Mary Watry's house on nearby Andrew Lane. She had complained to Verizon a few days earlier that her dial tone had gone out - again. It had returned by the time Long arrived, but she suspected the problem wasn't solved.

"My service seems to be working well," she told him. "We'll find out when it rains, though, because usually when it rains, I lose it."

This isn't happening just to Watry and her neighbors near Burksdale Road, according to Long and other local Verizon technicians. Dozens of areas around Hampton Roads experience routine outages because of aging equipment that needs replacing, they said.

Over time, seeping water, chewing squirrels and rubbing foliage destroy phone cables. The problems have grown more common in the past five to 10 years, Long and other employees said, because Verizon doesn't act as quickly as it once did to replace damaged copper lines.

"There are plenty of neighborhoods out there that are on some very old cable that we really no longer maintain," said Kathy Hillman, a cable splicer for Verizon and vice president of the Communications Workers of America Local 2202, which represents local phone company technicians.

A Verizon spokesman said the company continues to give adequate attention to copper lines, though he acknowledged that it must balance resources between the older system and its newly built fiber-optic network.

"Verizon is committed to providing quality service, and we do that," said Harry Mitchell, the spokesman. "That's not to say that we are perfect. Certainly no service provider is perfect."

The "feeder" cable causing problems starts at a pole on Burksdale Road and travels about 350 feet through backyards, carrying enough copper wire to deliver phone and Internet service to 200 customers in the Oakdale Farms neighborhood off Tidewater Drive.

"The cable's totally shot," Long said. "It needs to be replaced, and the company's budget doesn't allow for it. That's what engineering keeps telling us."

Customers who depend on those deteriorated wires frequently lose their dial tones, hear static, or see their Internet connections suddenly disappear, said Long, 48, also a Local 2202 vice president.

Watry said her phone will ring, then go dead or turn to static when she picks up. She has called Verizon about service outages at least five times in the past month alone, she said.

"It encouraged me to get a cellphone, which I wouldn't have done otherwise," she said.

An unemployed nurse, Watry said she relies on the Internet to fill out job applications and do banking online.

"When the phone line goes down, the Internet goes with it," she said. "And if it happens when I'm in the middle of an application, it wipes out everything. I have to start over."

Verizon technicians identified the deteriorated Burksdale Road cable about five years ago, Long said. They submitted a "plant condition report" for that site that tells the company the cable needs replacement.

The engineering department decides whether to send a line crew out to replace it. So far, that hasn't happened at Burksdale Road.

"Years ago, we could go ahead and submit that report and the situation would be taken care of," often within a few weeks, Hillman said.

Verizon will take "corrective action" when it sees a number of problems grouped in one area, but it has to prioritize among many parts of its system, Mitchell said.

"We are limited by budget and by staffing," he said. "By and large, we're doing a good job of assessing the needs that are out there and responding to those needs in a timely fashion."

Verizon must file monthly reports to Virginia regulators on outage restoration, tracking copper-line repairs separately from those on its fiber-optic system, known as FiOS.

The reports stem from a 2010 investigation by the State Corporation Commission into the company's service quality, focusing on response times to customer problems and the frequency of outages.

"There were concerns that had been raised over the past year or two that they were neglecting their copper network in favor of their FiOS network," said William Irby, director of the commission's Division of Communications.

In July, Verizon's report shows that it cleared 95.8 percent of its FiOS trouble calls within 48 hours and 92.6 percent of problems on the copper network, Irby said. "They are not responding quite as well on the copper repairs as on the FiOS repairs."

Verizon acknowledged that its FiOS network generates far fewer complaints than its copper system. In a 2007 filing with the commission, the company wrote that it received 11 trouble calls about FiOS service for every 100 trouble calls from customers with the older, copper lines.

Verizon started building the fiber network in Hampton Roads in 2005 and now offers FiOS phone, Internet or TV service to about 250,000 local households. Watry and other residents in Oakdale Farms aren't among them - nor are most customers living in Norfolk or Suffolk.

Meanwhile, in the past decade, Verizon has lost almost half of its landline customers, Mitchell said. They cut the cord in favor of mobile phones or switched to competitors, such as Cox Communications Inc. or Internet-based technology such as Vonage and Skype.

That means the company has less revenue coming in from its traditional land lines and less money to put back into them, he said. "We have adjusted our workforce," he said, "in order to continue to remain successful."

Watry said she doesn't want to switch to a competitor but does want reliable service. Now, she's paying for a dial tone and Internet connection that's sometimes on, sometimes off.

"It's not right," she said. "If we were paying the bill sometimes, and sometimes not, they would cut us off."

Customers who lose service should alert Verizon right away and ask for a credit for the outage time, Mitchell said. Watry received a break on her bill once, when she lost her Internet service for a week, she said.

"I've been with Verizon a long time, and I hope they get their stuff together," Watry said. "If not, I might have to drop my phone service and just use my cellphone."

Last week, Watry's line suffered from a "ground hum," Long found while up a utility pole near her house.

"Once the copper gets exposed, the wires start touching each other," he said. "That can cause havoc on both the Internet and the phone line."

He drove back to the spot where the troubled feeder cable begins on Burksdale Road. About 20 feet up on that pole, he pulled apart a tangle of wires, trying to pinpoint Watry's hum.

Verizon repairs typically take one and a half to two hours. For the customers served by the Burksdale Road cable and others like it, the work can last three hours or more.

"It used to be, we'd fix something, it would stay fixed," Long said.

The cable on this pole still had an old, rubber "closure," a protective casing around a spot where multiple phone lines split into different directions. Newer, hard-plastic closures are airtight, Long said.

Over on another pole near Watry's house, the closure cover was gone. Technicians wrapped it with a "slicker," a heavy piece of plastic like a garbage bag that doesn't work well to keep rain out.

A decade ago, Long could have replaced a deteriorated closure cover. That repair would take about a half-hour and could help reduce problems for nearby customers.

Today, Verizon supervisors generally won't authorize such unscheduled work, Long and Hillman said. Technicians are required to complete a certain number of jobs each day.

"It's a productivity thing," Hillman said. "There's a lot of pressure put on a technician to clear a job and move on to the next one."

Mitchell denied that the company prevents technicians from doing such work.

"If they're able to make repairs within a relatively short period of time, we expect them to do so," he wrote in an email. "If the terminal repair will require more time, they're expected to report the issue, and we subsequently will schedule the repair."

About three hours after arriving on Burksdale Road, Long "tramped" a pair of unused wires onto Watry's line, replacing the damaged ones. That fixed her outage - for the time being.

He stopped at Watry's fence on his way out, handed her his business card and apologetically told her to call him directly, if needed: "You may have problems again."

Carolyn Shapiro, (757) 446-2270, carolyn.shapiro@pilotonline.com