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.

Comments

dark fiber?

[tewwetruggur]

Isn't that for constipated evil people?

Re:Dark fiber glut? Duh!

[dachshund]

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.

Dark fiber glut? Duh!

[GuyZero]

Since it costs about the same amount of money to lay one strand of fiber as it does to lay 10,000 strands, it seems somewhat obvious that immediately after a big fiber laying expansion that the amount of unused capacity would grossly exceed the amount used.

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.