Verizon training workers to help usher in the future

MARLBOROUGH -- Joe Lynch's job is about to get a lot more interesting.

To the casual observer, it may look like Lynch, who has been working for Verizon Communications Inc. as a service technician since 1998, will still be doing the same basic job: installing a gray box on the side of customers' homes and connecting a line out to the pole on the street.

Today, that line brings in telephone service, and maybe Internet access at speeds of 1 or 2 megabits per second.

But the new line and box Lynch has been learning to install this week will do infinitely more: four phone numbers. 30 megabits of Internet access, roughly 600 times faster than a dial-up modem. And hundreds of channels of television, including a dozen or more in high definition, that turn the phone company into a viable alternative to cable or satellite TV.

All that service -- called FiOS -- will come into the home through a single strand of fiber-optic cable scarcely bigger than a human hair.

''I was completely blown away when I saw what this could do," said Lynch, who works out of the Milford offices. ''It really is our future."

As the nation's biggest phone company presses ahead with the most radical transformation in the history of the Bell System network, many Verizon workers have been undergoing a major retraining effort over the last seven months. By year-end, Verizon expects about 1,320, or 30 percent, of its New England outdoor technicians will have gone through 80-hour classes to learn fiber installation. Verizon teaches FiOS at a Marlborough training facility that includes everything from pole-climbing gym rooms and payphone installation training to computer labs.

Instead of learning how to splice two copper wires together, FiOS technicians have to learn how to use a $10,000 machine to fuse fiber optic lines to an accuracy of 1/250th of an inch. Instead of the century-old rule to ''check for dial tone," the new rule is, ''check for light."

In the world of copper wire phone service, the most common problems for technicians are phone lines gnawed by squirrels or snapped by falling tree limbs.

Both of those will continue to be headaches in deploying FiOS. But, when asked what's turned out to be the biggest real-world complication deploying FiOS, Verizon training supervisor David Robinson thought for a moment and then said, ''Windows 98."

That is, Verizon technicians have found that a leading glitch for serving FiOS customers is computers that don't run a sufficiently up-to-date Microsoft operating system for the powerful optical connections and associated gear.

As part of a $6 billion plan to roll out FiOS nationally, Verizon has confirmed it is deploying it in 28 Greater Boston cities and towns, mostly suburbs like Lexington, Natick, and Wellesley where above-ground utilities -- and affluent broadband-craving homeowners -- offers the best business prospects. Last week the company said it was extending FiOS service to Lynn, Nahant, and Swampscott.

Within the last month, the company has begun signing up customers in three communities: Holliston, Reading, and West Newbury. For now, FiOS offers only premium broadband, such as 15 megabits per second access for $45 a month, when bundled with phone service. As Verizon wins municipal cable franchises, it hopes to roll out TV service by fall.

Visibly, one of the few differences between FiOS and conventional phone service is the size of the gray box that goes on the side of a house.

The roughly 11 by 17-inch ''optical network terminal" converts the incoming fiber line into four telephone lines, a broadband data connection, and a video plug. Subscribers also need to have two other, smaller boxes installed in their home, an electric converter, and an 8-hour battery backup for phone service if power fails. For homeowners who balk at having the big terminal put on the side of the house, Robinson said, Verizon will agree to put it inside -- but that means someone has to be home to let a repair technician in.

Dave Reardon, business agent for Local 2222 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represents hundreds of technicians learning FiOS, said union leaders are working out disagreements with Verizon over issues like how people can qualify for jobs at the Providence administration center. Some IBEW leaders around the country worry, Reardon said, that FiOS could help Verizon cut technician ranks because the optical fiber is much less prone than copper wire to failures from rain or melting snow.

But overall, local members welcome the technology and have liked the training. ''Most people understand," Reardon said, ''that this is the technology of the future."

Peter J. Howe can be reached at howe@globe.com.