Correction: I inadvertantly called Jerry Vasquez, the guy in charge at Verizon’s FiOS hub in Pomona, Jesse. I’ve corrected below. Apologies to Mr. Vasquez!

In the beginning, someone at Verizon said, “Let there be FiOS.” And there was. And it was good. At least for the people who can order the TV service.

In Orange County, we are among the lucky areas where FiOS TV is offered, although it’s only available in limited parts of the county. The TV service, which rivals cable’s channel offerings but adds interactivity and much more, continues to get gushing reviews from customers and praise from industry followers. 

As I continue to answer the question for readers “Where is FiOS,” Verizon invited me to tour its Pomona facility to see the only FiOS TV hub in California. There, Jerry Vasquez, manager of network engineering, showed me why FiOS could conquer the market for paid-television services.

“Our customers don’t care, they just want to make sure NFL Networks is on. How we make sure that happens is what we specialize in now,” Vasquez said. “Where Verizon specialized in telecom years ago, now it’s video. And we have the talent and the deep pockets to achieve that.”

But before I get into what happens in Pomona, let me backtrack and explain how FiOS TV gets to a customer’s home.

TV service starts with, of course, the TV networks, which upload their programming to satellites. Verizon has two “satellite farms,” located in Bloomington, Ind. Illinois (thanks “A V Rabinbowitz for pointing out my error), and Temple Terrace, Fla. The two locations, also called the super head ends, have a ton of satellite dishes on the roof, which receive signals from TV stations nationwide. Verizon didn’t have a photo but Google Maps did:

Each provides Verizon FiOS with the same exact thing. Verizon uses two sources so one backs up the other  in case there’s a bad hurricane in Florida or snowstorm in Illinois. From here, the TV signals are sent out on Verizon’s “fiber long-haul network,” which is the giant fiber-optic pipe Verizon built across the country. A constant stream flows past FiOS’ 15 hubs nationwide, with each hub grabbing what it needs from the main stream at a rate of 10 gigabits per second, according to Vasquez.    

From the hub, the signals are sent straight to the customer’s house over fiber. If you’ve spotted technicians next to Verizon vans with big reels of cable (such as in the photo of a New York City installation on the right), there’s a good chance that FiOS is just around the corner.

After a customer orders service, Verizon must connect the customer’s house to the already-laid fiber in the city. Hence, there may be digging involved, which is a reason why apartment and condo dwellers must get permission from the landlord or property owner.

And voila! That’s how FiOS gets to your TV. Now back to the FiOS TV hub in Pomona…

Inside the building, everything centered on the control room dubbed “The Bullpen,” which has a wall of giant video screens showing live broadcasts and potential breakdowns in the network. Above left, Jerry Vasquez explains the layout of the room. Behind Jerry’s head, a screen of nine channels flip through live broadcasts all day.  

Can you see me now?

In the middle, two large screens illustrate the health of the FiOS TV network. Two network engineers monitor the health 24/7 (although during my visit, Jerry sent them out of the room). Since Pomona gets the same data from two sources (Illinois and Florida), there is constant service even if a hurricane knocks out the Florida facility.  If Verizon senses a 10-percent loss in data, it switches to the better source.

Jerry did a demonstration of the switch for us with an “Austin Powers” powers movie. He said, “Now, watch the screen,” and then, “Did you see that?” See what? None of us in the room saw even a flicker as the movie switched from the Florida source to the Illinois.

“This board is displaying the video, the signal flow throughout the network telling us what state that it’s in,” Vasquez said. “It’s similar to a stop light. Green is good, yellow is warning and red is bad. And, like I said, there are two people constantly here looking at the network to make sure services are up and are operational. We do three-hour channel checks to make sure we’re checking over 600 channels to make sure they are of Verizon quality.”

In fact, since FiOS has someone monitoring channels at all hours, it has been the first to report outages to the TV channel’s own operator since most TV stations don’t have someone watching their own channels 24/7.  

On the right, another display shows 25 live TV channels, which can be switched out at any time. My visit was on Feb. 17, the original deadline for TV stations nationwide to switch to all-digital broadcasts. FiOS engineers were monitoring all the local stations, just in case. Notice one channel is completely dark? That’s KVCR’s Channel 24. KVCR was having outages unrelated to the digital transition and FiOS.

A few more key facts I picked up on my visit:

• Verizon FiOS is available to 900,000 homes in Southern California, which is about a third of the area where Verizon offers landline telephone service. Of that, only about 20 percent of these homes have ordered FiOS TV.
• Verizon’s FiOS offers 600 channels, but the number is changing constantly. A few days after my visit, FiOS added KVEA HD to the channel lineup. It had also removed Varsity TV, which went out of business. Channels are constantly changing.
• Verizon became the leader of HD channels last week, offering at least 107, compared to DirecTV’s 104 HD channels. It also offers 6,000 individual video-on-demand streams.
• Because FiOS uses fiber-optic technology throughout, there’s a lot more capacity in the lines, unlike cable TV. I asked Vasquez whether the FiOS network could handle the video data if all the channels went to full high-definition 1080p broadcasts. He said yes, but the company would need to do a lot of work to the electronics on both ends of the fiber-optic lines.  ”We wouldn’t have to rebuild the pipe,” he said.
• As I reported before, Verizon is going after cities currently in its territory for home phone service. However, in Dallas, the FiOS network is completely builtout so it is now expanding into non-Verizon territory.

“I would love to shake the hand of the guy that saved this company,” Vasquez said. “…Somebody took that chance and said no, we’re going to do video and we’re going to rebuild our entire architecture and it’s going to cost us billions and billions of dollars. … You said it yourself, you hear from readers telling you they can’t get (FiOS) fast enough.”

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