----- Original Message -----
From: "Jason Baugher" <jason@thebaughers.com>
What we've seen is that the RBOC typically has a lot of crap copper in the ground, in a lot of cases air-core (pre gel-fill) that hasn't held up well. With the popularity of DSL, they ran out of good pairs to use. As they ran out of pairs, they eventually had to put in remote terminals to handle any new voice orders. They knew the future was fiber, at least to the node, so they had no incentive to build new copper plant, and little incentive to maintain the existing plant.
I have been saying, out loud, in public places, for at least 15 years, that Verizon's *real* incentive in doing FiOS was to clean up after 3 decades of GTE doing cut-to-clear rather than fixing actual problems in their copper OSP... Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274