Downtown businesses are about to see their communications choices increase thanks to new fiber optic cables being threaded through the heart of Providence under the city’s streets. Fiber optic cables are bundles of hair-thin, flexible glass rods that carry telephone calls and data encoded on laser light.
The local fiber optic rings are being installed separately by AT&T Corp. of New York and NEES Communications Inc., a subsidiary of New England Electric System of Westborough, Mass. New England Electric also owns Narragansett Electric Co.
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The companies plan to tie major downtown office buildings into their fiber optic loops, a development that should benefit businesses in the area by offering them additional telecommunications services and more choice of providers.
Scores of upstart telecommunications providers are competing to carry business telephone calls and data from Providence to the rest of the globe and back. But the robust competition mostly ends at the telephone company’s local switching centers on Washington and Broad streets.
Despite the proliferation of competitive telephone carriers and their fast-growing regional and national fiber optic networks, there’s generally just one path available between a local switching center and a Providence business: Bell Atlantic’s telephone lines.
But that’s changing.
Brooks Fiber Properties Inc. of St. Louis built a competing fiber optic loop in dowtown Providence in the mid-1990s. The company, which later was rolled into telecommunications giant MCI WorldCom Inc., now operates six fiber optic loops in the greater Providence area. The company’s telecommunication lines serve more than 60 locations in Lincoln, Woonsocket, Cumberland, Pawtucket and Providence, according to an MCI WorldCom spokeswoman,
AT&T’s and NEESCom’s fiber optic loops would provide a third and fourth choice for Providence businesses. AT&T officials didn’t respond to telephone calls by press time.
NEESCom threads its underground fiber optic cables through protective pipes, called conduits, built by its affiliated electric utilities. Utility regulators require the parent company’s power and telecommunications operations to remain strictly separate, but consultants hired last year by the state Attorney General’s office to scrutinize Narragansett Electric’s pending acquisition of the state’s other major electric utilities argued that electric ratepayers here are subsidizing NEESCom.
Installing and maintaining conduits is a normal cost of providing electric services and, as such, is reflected in electric rates. Because Narragansett Electric leases space in some of its conduits to NEESCom, the attorney general’s consultants argued, ratepayers shouldn’t have to pay to maintain any portion of a conduit that isn’t used to provide electric service to them.
NEESCom so far has built a 600-mile fiber optic network in eastern Massachusetts that includes several loops in downtown Worcester. The company leases the so-called “dark fiber” to competitive telecommunications providers and Internet service providers, who then install special lasers to beam light through the glass strands. ”We’re offering a choice, saying, ‘We can get you directly into your customer’s building without you having to pay for it through Bell Atlantic,’ ” NEESCom Sales Manager John DeStefano said.
NEESCom’s downtown Worcester loop circles the city’s business district passing 150 buildings and more than 800 businesses, according to the company.
The company’s fiber optic cables cross into Rhode Island in Pawtucket and currently extend as far south as Providence. NEESCom plans to run its main fiber optic line further south and then loop back around to the north, perhaps through Smithfield, DeStefano said. He declined to disclose the company’s planned investment in its Rhode Island network.
As in Providence, local fiber optic rings eventually would extend the network closer to individual customers.
“What we’ve done in Providence is kind of speculative to a certain extent by knowing that the carriers want to be in high-density areas,” he said. “It made sense to come down some of the main streets.”
NEESCom must now get the go-ahead to extend fiber optic lines from its downtown rings into individual buildings, such as The Fleet Center on Kennedy Plaza.
Rick O’Brien, who manages The Fleet Center, said Brooks Fiber Properties ran its lines into the building five years ago and AT&T was scheduled to begin wiring the building immediately. O’Brien said NEESCom hadn’t contacted him yet.
“We think competition is healthy, and we think any amenity we can provide for our tenants is probably an option we should pursue, but we’re really not sure how much more we really need,” he said. “The tenants are not telling us that there’s a huge demand for this.”
Not yet, anyway.
DeStefano expects competitive telephone carriers to be interested in the downtown loops because many of their fiber optic networks run through Providence en route to Boston and New York. “What we’re doing is giving them the ability to jump off their network into the local area,” he said.
In a similar development, Providence-based Log On America Inc. last month struck a deal with Paolino Properties LP that taps the local competitive carrier to provide telecommunications services to Paolino buildings including more than half-a-million square feet of downtown office space.
Earlier this month, Log On America announced it had won a major contract to provide local telephone service to Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Rhode Island.
