PDF of this tutorialThe characteristics of rural telephony or cable providers are quite different from those in an urban environment. Some of the reasons for the unique characteristics of rural operators include facilities, staffing, and service needs. These differences result from a much lower–density environment than found in an urban locale. Exchanges, instead of serving tens of thousands, often serve populations measuring in the hundreds.
Like urban environments, the local loop is straining under the demands of new services and often has insufficient capacity. The local loop often has an aging copper plant with analog pairgain devices, incapable of providing today's digital-service requirements. Unlike urban areas, the loop distances between the CO and subscribers are often measured in miles, rather than feet. Integration of exchanges, resulting from purchases, mergers, and swaps, is a necessity. Finally, trials of new technology are often impractical, as the sizes of the operations do not justify the cost of a trial.
The staffing for rural operations reflects the number of customers served. Some of the smaller operations have less than five people for the entire company! The engineering staff typically consists of a generalist whose knowledge includes both the CO and outside plant. Similarly, the maintenance and operations craft are not specialists and often work on both electronics and outside-plant facilities.
The service needs of rural operations are not homogenous. The requirements for a subscriber outside of Oran, Iowa will probably be different from those of a telecommuter on the outskirts of Aspen, Colorado. As with any local-access network, growth can occur anywhere along the loop. The key difference with a rural local loop is that the growth can occur anywhere along a loop measured in miles, rather than kilofeet. In other words, it is much more difficult to predict growth. Once established, however, the customers tend to be primarily low churn.
To leverage the operators' minimal staffing, a rural full-service network requires a local-loop architecture that is simple to plan, learn, install, provision, and maintain. Similarly, it must be reliable and, if possible, redundant to minimize staffing requirements for maintenance and repairs. Reliability is also required to provide the lifeline service customers expect.
The network must be flexible, as the required services could include everything from POTS to Internet to video. As much as possible, the network should use the existing facilities to gain the benefit of existing craft knowledge as well as to reduce total system investment. Lastly, it must accommodate possible growth anywhere in the service area.
