Slashdot Mirror
Bandwidth Speculation's Legacy: Dark Fiber
Darwin O'Connor pointed out this article in thestar.com which "says there has been massive amounts of fibre-optics put into the ground that hasn't been hooked up because of a lack of capital, despite Internet capacity problems. It compares the situation to the railways in the 1870s." It's tantalizing that there's so much bandwidth via fiber, but prices aren't exactly dropping for home users.
So it's not economical to hook up these cables. You are expecting the companies to throw away their profits for the good of humanity? Please.
The opposite side of this argument is that the demand just isn't there. Everyone bitches about Internet overload and how slow is or will get, but is anyone doing anything about it (besides pointing it out and complaining)? The bandwidth is not being demanded because no one is paying for it, apparently because our current network performance is acceptable to the vast majority of the customers. This fiber is just excess left over from the now-burst Internet bubble. If you want to drive bandwidth growth, be ready to buy it when someone provides it. Or invest in Qwest or something.
1) If you are going to lay fiber, you're going to lay LOTS of fiber, not just a couple strands, even if you don't yet know how or when you are going to use the excess. The incremental cost of doing this is negligible.
2) You are not just going to sell that excess fiber off to other parties once you lay it, you'd rather keep it for yourself. Selling it off can set precedent, especially in the regulated telecom industry, and you may not be able to reclaim it in the future.
3) Internet bandwidth shortage? Come on. There is LOTS of bandwidth available; if bandwidth doubled, would profits double? No. Until lack of bandwidth starts hurting profits, there will not be more bandwidth... that's how things work in the real world.
The thing that you're forgetting that there are issues with flow in fiber that's not the same as with a highway.
There just aren't that many things that you can compare dark fiber to. Highways are dramtically different from fiber, as to lay dark fiber is like you're building the roads without putting in any entrance/exit ramps. The roads are there, but without spending more money, no one can use it. Even more unlike roads is that the cost of the fiber for the most part is in labor and permits. [permission to dig, then the number of union people, and the machinery needed to put the stuff into the ground]. Now, sure, as we all know, when digging a 6' deep pit to hide the bodies, as you've already dug the hole, it's just as easy to get rid of two bod...
um....anyway, the reason that your analogy fails is that cars have stayed relatively the same. Through the use of additional wavelengths, and different switching technologies, we can now get significantly more data through a single strand than we could have when the fiber was laid. If anything with cars the people driving them have gotten dumber, and cause more accidents it seems, as everyone's in a rush, and doesn't know how to drive, and in the end, if you pack too many cars on the roads, you actually slow down traffic.
You don't have these issues with fiber. [You can, however, have some of these issues with copper, which is why there's a maximum transmit power allowed by the FCC, which is what keeps v.90 modems from ever getting to 56kbps in the US, to eliminate cross talk between lines...which does work on the highway analogy, as they're the dumbasses driving erraticly and changing lanes, causing accidents]
So anyway, as traffic grows to fill the fiber, fiber technology will improve, allowing us to get more data on the line [imagine if everyone had to ride the bus, so there was overall less congestion on the road]. For the companies, as they've got fewer strands connected, they have less equiptment, which takes fewer people to maintain, and uses less power, and takes up less space, generates less heat, etc.
So, although I agree that traffic will increase, I don't see us filling the lines anytime soon. I'm guessing that lines will be sold for private networks, rather than just being used by the people who laid them.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
They layed tons of fiber all over the place. When you have to lay fiber, its easier to lay in 12 or 24 at a time even when you only need 4. If you have to run some, might as well run more than you need. It's cheaper to put more in once than put more in again later.
It's the transmission equipment that costs. The repeaters/terminals that have to go in all along the way (~50 miles apart I think, maybe more) that cost a million each unit. That is hard to come by.
Sure, go light up all that dark fiber. All it'll cost you is a few hundred million, then you have another 10 GB cross country fiber.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
There was a great article a month ago in the Economist about how telecom companies over-investing in fibre was the main cause of the recent economic blues. The general sense of the story was how a few buyouts of a few metropolitan fibre companies in 97-98 sparked a huge boom in investment in laying fibre.
But once the fibre started to be lit up, a dozen large telecom companies (nortel, alcatel, lucent, etc) started to compete with each other for cheap bits. When the price started falling, everyone realised there was too much capacity, and not enough margins reselling the bandwidth.
The equipment manufacturers (cisco, lucent, redback, etc) had sold tons of fibre terminating equipment to start-up and established telcos by financing long-term loans. Those loans were based on the (bad) assumption that prices for bits would stay at the same level. Prices dropped, and now many telcos don't have the income to pay off their loans. Since there is no more investment in new fibre termination equipment, the fibre will stay dark until the next economic boom.
There just isn't enough cheap hardware available to terminate all this dark fibre. There is literally tons of very expensive kit sitting in warehouses that cisco, nortel, and lucent can't sell. When those machines have buyers, then we will see prices continue downwards.
This is an economic problem, not a last mile problem. When the economy turns back up, then that fibre will start to light up as well, and long-haul prices will stay low, but bandwidth demands will increase.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
They wouldn't have to add any routing ability, they're feeding you a line of crap. They'd need to convert it from a regen to an add/drop node, which is trivial. Depending on the manufacturer, it involves adding a few cards (Nortel) or another chassis to support the tributary interfaces (Fujitsu). All of this can be done without taking the ring out of service.
The cost is negligible compared to the initial cost of the regenerator. All the high-speed interfaces already exist, and the mid/low-speed cards are mucho cheap.
This would allow you to get a channel within their OC-n pipe. Since Dexter sits between two universities, and you can bet Sprint provides bandwidth to both of them, you simply drop the same channel at the next node and tie into umich's routers.
You asked Sprint "Can we get onto your backbone here?" and they gave you a price for it, which rightly scared you. Ask them this: "Can you drop an OC3 trib for us here, and then drop it again in Ann Arbor?" You'll find that the cost of blind transport is a lot cheaper than intelligent routing. Backhaul the signal to Umich's network center and let it do the packet tango down there, where the facilities already exist.
Each telecom laid plenty of extra dark fiber, to be sure, but they also assumed that a much larger portion of what they laid would be utilized ...
Not true.
If you dig a trench from California to New York, are you going to lay in a couple of fibers and when you need more dig another trench, or are you going to lay enough fibers that you don't need to dig another trench for a hundred years? Especially when essentially ALL the cost is digging the trench.
The tellcos did NOT expect all the fiber to be lit up soon. And they do NOT buy equipment to light it up until they NEED to light it up - because Moore's Law applies to the equipment. (Are you going to buy equipment today to light fibers that won't be needed for two years? Or are you going to put the money to earning more money for a couple years then buy a box that can light twice as much bandwidth and have bux left over?)
So with the economic slowdown the fibers aren't getting lit up as fast as some people expected. That's no skin off the carriers' noses - they had to dig the trench and lay the fiber to have a business at all. The box makers are having a hard time because the carriers aren't buying many boxes, so the box makers' stocks have tanked.
But the box makers' stocks are bottoming out. (The carriers ARE still installing boxes, and before all the ones they already bought are in service the carriers will have to order some more.) And some market players would like them to tank even more, so they can make more money by anticipating the move.
So suddently the press "discovers" the dark fiber. And you see scare articles that make it sound like it's a disaster, a major failure of planning on the carriers' part. "Oh, dear! Only 5% of the fiber is being used. (wring hands) The SKY is falling!" As if the carriers were in trouble because only 5% of their investment was generating revenue, instead of all but a small delta of it - just like they intended.
And the stocks tank for a couple more days, letting the players pick up more at fire-sale prices before they recover.
Disaster my aching tail. The only thing that would be a disaster for a carrier would be if the dark fiber ran out and the carrier had to dig again.
Yes the slowdown is hard on the box makers, who'd like to sell more boxes than they are. But it's a slowing of growth, not a retreat. So the boxes still sell - and when things pick up (or when the carriers exhaust their pre-bought inventory even before a recovery) the boxes will be selling a lot faster.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That was on the residential side. Virtually no one was interested. A few line resellers emerged, essentially re-packaging local loops under their own brand names, but the margin was too small, to bother with going after the residential market for voice. Covad, IP Technologies, and Rythms were notable exceptions, but their business was based on DSL sales - an area that Bell companies were clearly dragging their feet on (since sales there clobbered their highly lucrative DS1 (T1) business.) However, when the DSL resellers got going, the Bells (LECS) responded with aggressive DSL rollouts, usually at loss-leader pricing, which essentially sucked the life out of the Covads before they could begin to realize much revenue. However, the lucrative market for business service remained. In that market, local LECs were hideously overcharging for bandwidth (and still do), and fairly small construction projects could reach multiple companies fairly quickly.
So a lot of CLECS charged forward, building out fiber in metropolitan areas on speculation. Almost none of them built to serve the residential market. Instead, they expected to "cherry pick" big business accounts, by offering rates on fiber connectivity much cheaper than the LECs were offering (and most LECs were still selling only copper pairs, at DS1-DS3 speeds).
Unfortunately, the CLECS didn't bother to keep track of what their competitors were doing. So in many cities, 10 and 20 clecs, would lay lines to reach the same customer areas. It may seem overly simple to you, but the fact is, most companies contract with one company for Internet service. That left an awful lot of fiber laying around unused, and earning no revenue, for the venture capitalists that gambled their dollars on fiber expansions. It's still there, and right about now, many of them are beginning to panic. Chapter 11's and 13's are being filed, even as we speak.
That's a sort of simplified explanation, but it should immediately point to why the long-haul networks aren't getting used. Because the short-haul networks that they expected to service, aren't being used either. Gotta sell the clients first.
On the residential side, it's simply death by strangulation.
The cable companies currently own the high-speed to the home market, because their nets were the cheapest to equip, and because they moved fully two years before the phone companies did. The cable companies also ejoy almost complete freedom from any regulatory restraints (now you know why you sit on hold 3 hours), while the DSL market is still heavily regulated. The phone companies, are playing catchup. And the poor DSL CLECS, are still screwed trying to get their products installed, fighting with the LECS over what kind of equipment they can install, at what rate, etc, in the State PUCs. Add to that the "difficulty" the LECs are having hooking their work order systems up with CLEC's order systems, squabbles over line standards, confusion over who does what and when, and you have a sure-thing recipe. At the PUC's, the armies of lawyers the Bell companies have sent in to every rulemaking, have turned every question into a long-running evidentiary process, presumably in the expectation that the CLECS won't have the resources to hold out. Correct assumption, I suppose. Proof, that the Lawyer is once again mightier than the law.
A couple of interesting things to watch on the legal scene - a 9th circuit ruling that cable modems were in fact a "telecom service" as opposed to a "cable service" conflicts directly with a 5th circuit ruling (or was it 4th) to the contrary. So expect the issue to be decided by the Supremes soon. If Cable companies are required to open up their networks for resale, watch for the LECs to play some really nasty games in order to bring down the profits the Cable companies are currently receiving. In another arena, keep an eye on the Dingell-Tauzin bill, which proves (as if we really needed the proof) yet again, that there's no such thing as a congressman that can't be bought outright by a phone company. That bill makes it even easier for the LECs to suck the life out of the CLECs, and also simplifies the task for the LECs of strangling the cable companies in a mountain of paper, while evading paper themselves. You just thought @Home sucked now. Give it a couple of years.
The truth is, there's almost no really good news, on the Telco front for Internet users. If the Copyright and Content wars don't ruin it for you on the one side, the Telco's will bleed you dry on the other. Both sides have bought all the congressmen they need to get the job done. Just a matter of waiting now. If Hollywood and Bell have their way, we'll all be back to watching TV again in under 5 years.
I live in a small town in Michigan (Dexter, 12 scenic miles from Hell). We have a major Sprint node in town. A civic group of local civic technologists would love to tap into that, getting our tiny town some huge bandwidth. We love living here, and would like to see the internet connectivity being fast and cheap enough to attract Internet-based businesses.
But we can't currently generate enough $$$ to make it worthwhile. What Sprint has in place is basicly an optical repeater. To expand it into data service, they'd have to install an OC-XX router, where XX is probably greater than 12.
Ever priced an OC-12 router? Or facilities to support it remotely? The DS-3 cards and T1 cards to step down those speeds? The lines from your home or office to that router? The maintenance agreement on all that equipment?
But everyone would use it if it were available you say? Show me. Figure out that cost, go talk to your neighbors. See what you can get the cost per connection down to. We went thru that exercise for getting gas lines installed out here. Even with a three year payback, people weren't interested in anything over about $1000 one time cost. I'd be shocked if your neighborhood was willing to go $1000/ea plus $100/mo for ethernet to every home.
As an example proof of fibre being the easy part, I believe that WilTel some years ago sold their entire fibre infrastructure to some other company for quite a nice price. They retained one (count it) one strand in each bundle. That's been enough to handle all their traffic. It was brilliant, just frigging brilliant. Now someone else has to pay all their fibre infrastructure costs, and they just get one card in someone elses equipment.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
This tended to make the dark fibre problem worse in that less fibre was needed to carry more data.
The whole problme is the last mile to the house. Until there is an economical way to get high speed data to the home, its never going to happen. Cable modems stink bacuse of shared bandwidth (once you approach saturation - look out) but they rock now because they go EVERYWHERE. DSL rocks if you're near a central office - and with speeds in development approaching 4MBps and higher - sweet!
But DSLs problem is the need to be close to a CO. TO serve neghiborhoods, the telcos have to run fibre to each neighbor hood and concentrate the DSL connections there - cable has to do something similar - concentrate and backhaul to the data center. But runnign fibre to neighborhoods is EXPENSIVE!
I have to admit though the whole dark fibre phenom is encouraging. I watched AT&T drop new fibre along a right of way that runs through my nextdoor neighbors pasture. They dropped SIX fibre conduit in the ground - each capable of holding a LOT of fibre. Sticking it int eh ground is the labor intensive part - now that the conduit is there, if their fibre needs GROW beyond whats already IN the ground, they just snake mroe fibre through the unused conduit.
Even better - once they main fibre run was in teh ground, two more conduit were run alogn our road straight to - the local telco. Very encouraging :) Provides them with MAJOR bandwidth connectivity in teh near future (which believe it or not, they already have - they're a SMALL telco with an auxillary fibre backbone busienss go figure)
But the bottom line is, until teh last mile problem is solved in a fashion that can make the telcos/cable comanies/whoever some decent money that we're willing to pay - the bulk of that fibre will stay dark for some time.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Initially, it looked really silly, since there weren't many cars and there weren't many people driving all over. Now the highways are full. Same with fiber; traffic will grow to fill them to capacity. It will just take a few years.
I'll leave it up to other people to decide if that's a good thing.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Each telecom laid plenty of extra dark fiber, to be sure, but they also assumed that a much larger portion of what they laid would be utilized, and this would pay the debt created by the build-out, in addition to the maintenance. Unfortunately, they assumed wrong, partly due to the fact that all of the telcos built their networks at the same time. Now they don't have enough money to pay for the massive last-mile upgrades that will make all of that fiber worth something, so it'll sit dark for much longer than it was supposed to.
I mean, if all those fiber laying companies had laid just barely enough to meet current needs they'd have to go back and dig trenches again to create more bandwidth. That would be expensive. And dumb.
The situation is somewhat akin to looking at a newborn baby and saying "He's less than 5% of the size of a real man!" A-duh. Check back in 20 years and see how much of the fiber is still dark.
Crank Caller: Does your new silicon run fast?
IBM Marketing Rep: Yes, IBM's new transistor technolo...
Crank Caller: ...Then you'd better go and catch it! LOL!!!!11!!!1! ROTFL!!!! ROTFLMAO !!! ! U R L4|\/|3 !!!!!!
If you take an analogy to the early phone system, the problem is that the consolidation of the little ISPs happened way too rapidly. The big guys should have waited for the locals to wire up all the neighborhoods and then bought them out.
--MarkusQ