PacBell Goes Down to the Wire to Meet Need for Speed

About 20 feet beneath Topanga Canyon Boulevard, Dennis Crouch is working to bring high-speed Internet access to 3,700 customers in Woodland Hills.

The Pacific Bell splicing technician is installing 4,200 pairs of twisted copper wire that the phone company will use to bring a range of new services to the neighborhood. Few are in as much demand as ADSL, or asymmetric digital subscriber line--a technology that lets users connect to the Internet seven to 27 times faster than with a standard dial-up modem.

PacBell said it has received thousands of inquiries about ADSL since the service was made available to Californians in July. The company won’t say how many people have signed up so far, but it is certainly in a hurry to add more.

Today, 90 of PacBell’s more than 650 central offices have been upgraded to offer ADSL, and the company plans to boost that number to 255 by the end of the year. At that point, the service would be available to about 5 million homes and 900,000 businesses--about half the state’s customer base.

The rush to roll out high-bandwidth services isn’t just happening in California. SBC Communications, Pacific Bell’s San Antonio-based parent company, plans to offer ADSL technology to 8.2 million homes and 1.3 million businesses throughout its eight-state territory by the end of the year.

GTE has offered the service to about 3.25 million of its customers--including 1.4 million in California--and it plans to add 1 million more by the fall. Bell Atlantic, BellSouth and Ameritech are also expanding their ADSL services, while US West is introducing an alternative high-speed technology.

Local phone companies aren’t the only ones eager to sell high-speed Internet access. Cable TV firms are putting their coaxial cable lines to use delivering data in addition to television signals. Tele-Communications Inc., Cox Communications, Comcast and others have teamed up to form @Home, which connects more than 330,000 customers to the Internet. Time Warner and MediaOne sell a competing service called Roadrunner to more than 200,000 customers.

Those numbers are putting pressure on Pacific Bell to upgrade its infrastructure so it can market ADSL to more than the 2 million customers who are eligible for the service now. That task falls largely into the hands of telephone engineer Ian McNeill.

As PacBell’s regional manager for loop planning in California and Nevada, McNeill is responsible for getting the phone network in shape to handle new services like asymmetric digital subscriber line. Layering a new technology on top of wires that have been in the ground for as long as 50 years can involve a lot of rehabilitation.

Every phone line consists of a pair of twisted copper wires that connect a home or business to one of PacBell’s central offices. One of those wires carries signals to the customer, and the other carries signals back to the central office. Together, the wires--typically sheathed in brightly colored plastic--are about as thick as a strand of dental floss.

Regular voice phone calls are carried at relatively low frequencies. Because ADSL signals are transferred at higher frequencies that don’t interfere with voice calls, users can talk on the phone and surf the Internet at the same time. The digital coding techniques used by ADSL modems can squeeze up to 99% more capacity out of a phone line, according to the ADSL Forum, an industry group.

The high-speed service is the latest in a string of technologies seeking to satiate consumers’ demand for faster Internet access. Standard modems have generally hit a transmission limit of about 56.6 kilobits of data per second. Integrated services digital network, or ISDN, can transmit data twice as fast, but even that is slow compared with a T-1 line, which can carry 1.5 megabits of data each second.

Using ADSL, data sent from a computer to the Internet travel at ISDN speeds, while data downloaded from the Internet are carried at T-1 rates--and sometimes faster.

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The signals are strongest for customers whose phone lines are less than 12,000 feet--or 2.3 miles--from a PacBell office. When the signals must travel farther than that, they start to fade.

To fortify those signals, engineers can trim unused phone lines that sap signal strength. They can also remove load coils, which are normally used to boost phone signals but interfere with ADSL systems. In addition, engineers have to make sure that the lines carrying digital services are segregated to prevent even more signal interference. But even with those time-consuming accommodations, current technology limits PacBell to serving customers within 17,500 feet, or about 3.3 miles, of a central office.

That is expected to change by summer, when the company gets its hands on new hardware--called DSL line cards--that will extend the reach of ADSL. The first of those cards are still being manufactured by French telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel.

In some neighborhoods, such as Woodland Hills, the problem isn’t the length or condition of the copper lines--it’s that there simply aren’t enough of them. That’s why Crouch is painstakingly splicing 4,200 new lines together, 25 lines at a time. Each color-coded wire must be individually threaded through the grooves of a plastic device that connects the cables coming in from both sides of the manhole where he is working.

When he finishes the splicing job in one manhole--a job he estimates takes about five days--Crouch begins the process again at another of the 20 or so manholes along Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Altogether, the job will take several months to complete. To speed up the process, Pacific Bell hired 150 additional technicians statewide to work on ADSL installation in January alone, said Mel McKee, construction splicing supervisor for the west San Fernando Valley.

Those wires will ultimately connect to a PacBell central office, a building that is typically several stories high and half-filled with cascades of telephone wires. Some of those wires are being routed into machines that separate voice traffic from data for up to 144 customers apiece. The data traffic is then routed to a network of special switches and sent out to customers.

By the end of this year, PacBell will have invested more than $100 million and countless hours on its ADSL deployment. At that point, the company will consider the next phase of its roll-out strategy, said PacBell spokesman Steve Getzug.

“Anyone who thinks DSL is a get-rich-quick scheme, they’re lying,” McNeill said.

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Karen Kaplan can be reached at karen.kaplan@latimes.com.