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Putting The Fiber Glut In Historical Perspective
securitas writes: "This editorial over at the New York Times makes a good case for the optical network buildout being an essential infrastructure project like the railroads, telegraph lines and interstate highways were of previous generations. These projects stimulated new inventions and applications and helped build a great nation. So if you lost a ton on JDS Uniphase, Ciena, Corning, Nortel and the rest, rest easy that you have helped build the future and inspire innovation."
rest easy that you have helped build the future and inspire innovation. 'in the porn industry' got cut off :o(
As always, the archives have the story without requiring NYT registration and login.
Q: could Slashcode be modified to transpose these URLs automatically?
Late last month Digital TV was launched in Finland. Billions of Finnish Marks had been spent on building a next-generation TV network for digital TV.
Now it seems this standard is already on it's way out, and to top it all off, the consumer products needed to actually watch digital TV aren't really available yet...
Just imagine how much better off we could have been if all that money had been spent on a broadband infrastructure for transporting any data, including TV. ARGH.
.: Max Romantschuk
The glut of fiber tends to be more in the metro space. I really don't see the middle of Iowa with a ton of fiber. What this does is give the opportunity for metro buildouts. It's going to be the battle of the cities verus the towns all over again.
Personally, I can't wait to have my own 100mb connection to the net.
dave
Easy for you to say if you never owned these stocks.
Nobody has ever seen a set of stocks get crushed so
savagely. Look at Juniper networks. Never in the
history of the world was a stock so loved. Even
a few months ago this stock used to go up and down
$15 in a day. Now it is under $14 down from a high
of $240.
Slashdot now inserts Futurama quotes in its headers. Just letting you know. Below are the ones I have collected so far. I assume I have 90% of them at least by now.
... you're the first.
...at being a big jerk who's stupid and his big ugly face is as dumb as a butt!
X-Fry: I don't regret this, but I both rue and lament it.
X-Fry: I refuse to testify on the grounds that my organs will be chopped up in to a patty.
X-Bender: Bender's a genius!
X-Fry: There's a lot about my face you don't know.
X-Fry: Nowadays people aren't interested in art that's not tattooed on fat guys.
X-Fry: I learned how to handle delicate social situations from a little show called 'Three's Company.'
X-Bender: Fry, of all the friends I've had
X-Bender: The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
X-Bender: Care to contribute to the Anti-Mugging-You Fund?
X-Fry: I heard one time you single-handedly defeated a hoard of rampaging somethings in the something something system.
X-Bender: In the event of an emergency, my ass can be used as a flotation device.
X-Bender: Oh no! Not the magnet!
X-Bender: There's nothing wrong with murder, just as long as you let Bender whet his beak.
X-Bender: Honey, I wouldn't talk about taste if I was wearing a lime green tank top.
X-Bender: Want me to smack the corpse around a little?
X-Bender: Like most of life's problems, this one can be solved with bending.
X-Bender: Oh, so, just 'cause a robot wants to kill humans that makes him a radical?
X-Bender: A woman like that you gotta romance first!
X-Bender: Hey Fry, I'm steering with my ass!
X-Bender: My full name is Bender Bending Rodriguez.
X-Bender: Oh, no room for Bender, huh? Fine. I'll go build my own lunar lander. With blackjack. And hookers. In fact, forget the lunar lander and the blackjack! Ah, screw the whole thing.
X-Bender: Well I don't have anything else planned for today, let's get drunk!
X-Fry: That's it! You can only take my money for so long before you take it all and I say enough!
X-Fry: How can I live my life if I can't tell good from evil?
X-Fry: Well, thanks to the internet I'm now bored with sex. Is there a place on the web that panders to my lust for violence?
X-Fry: But this is HDTV. It's got better resolution than the real world.
X-Fry: I'm flattered, really. If I was gonna do it with a big freaky mud bug, you'd be way up the list.
X-Bender: Forget your stupid theme park! I'm gonna make my own! With hookers! And blackjack! In fact, forget the theme park!
X-Fry: These new hands are great. I'm gonna break them in tonight.
X-Bender: OK, but I don't want anyone thinking we're robosexuals.
X-Bender: Bite my shiny, metal ass!
X-Bender: I hate people who love me. And they hate me.
X-Bender: Well I don't have anything else planned for today, let's get drunk!
X-Bender: My life, and by extension everyone else's, is meaningless.
X-Fry: Would you cram a sock in it, Bender? Those aren't even medals! They're bottle caps and pepperoni slices.
X-Fry: Leela, there's nothing wrong with anything.
X-Fry: I'm gonna be a science fiction hero, just like Uhura, or Captain Janeway, or Xena!
X-Fry: I'm never gonna get used to the thirty-first century. Caffeinated bacon?
X-Fry: I must be a robot. Why else would human women refuse to date me?
X-Fry: To Captain Bender! He's the best!
X-Fry: He's an animal. He belongs in the wild. Or in the circus on one of those tiny tricycles. Now that's entertainment.
X-Fry: Hey look, it's that guy you are!
X-Fry: Augh, I am so unlucky. I've run over black cats that were luckier than me.
X-Fry: No, no, I was just picking my nose.
X-Fry: That doesn't look like an "L", unless you count lower case.
X-Fry: Professor, please, the fate of the world depends on you getting to second base with Mom.
X-Fry: Leela, Bender, we're going grave-robbing.
http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/09/02/business/02C ONT.html
I hate to be a stickler, but the comment about "if you lost a ton on JDS Uniphase, Ciena, Corning, Nortel and the rest, rest easy that you have helped build the future and inspire innovation" has no relevance to building the fiber infrastructure.
The only time these companies would have benefited from your investment was when they offered primary and/or secondary IPOs. After that, buying their stock only raises the value of the stock for the people who own it (mainly executives, institutions, and joe public).
Unfortunatly the glut is in long haul fiber, not local fiber. The most exspensive part of any connetion is what is called the last mile. This is the connection between your house and the nearest switching station. The reason for this is simple, Age. In most places the copper in the ground has been their since the 1950's and in some cases longer. It is of different specs than are ideal and is corroding.
The problem with replacing it is that you have to get so many permits and studies just to replace one section of line that it is not feasable to do so. When congress de-regulated the phone industry they forced the local telco to give this last mile to the public domain. Any carrier can provide service over that mile of copper wire, be it DSL , POTS (Plain old telephone service), or long distance. This causes the eminent maintainer (the local telco) not to be interested at all in replacing any of it. Why replace it for other people? Monopolies are bad, but it does help to have someone who are directly responsible for maintaining a service.
Free peice of advice for the day BTW. If you have a 56K modem it really helps to reduce the number of analogue to digital conversion (56K can only stand one) If you are having signal problems call and have caller ID added to your list of services for a month. This forces the telco to move you from older equipment to the new digital equipment they are installing. This will provide better signal to you. After the month cancel the service, they won't bother to switch you back and you will keep the performance increase.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
The tech is there... Broadband cable
The problem is people are not buying. The situation here in australia is that you get your cable (optus or telstra) TV and then you have to pay extra (a lot extra) to get internet. Also they charge ANOTHER installation fee...
Anyway people won't buy broadband if they don't have a need for it, or can't benifit from it. How is your typical email using, instant chat inDUHvidual going to need boradband?
Now if comapanies (the cable ones) offered igh speed services that used the capacity of the cable.. it would start taking off
I know it's nothing special, but probably worth knowing - In my frustration at having to log-in to the NYTimes to read articles, I just tried guessing my way in, and guess what? I was successful on the 2nd attempt:
Login: password
Password: password
-----------------------
Moderator's essentials
Ahem...
"Oh look, I'm inspiring innovation!!!
I'm the magical future building man
Who lives in a gumdrop house on lollipop laaanne..."
BTW,I'm being sarcastic...
After my stock went south I had to sell the gumdrop house and move. I now live in a ramen noodle house on vinegar st.
Perhaps I'm being thick here, but isn't it kind of obvious that any available bandwidth will be used up eventually? How can we have "too much" fiber?
"These projects stimulated new inventions and applications "
Really? Like what? I think the whole thing has become a giant flop, no content, no meaningful stuff.
OK, I understand how my daily All-Bran helps with "stimulating new inventions". And "Inspire innovation"? Fair enough, it's happened to me a few times. But "helped build a great nation"?
Wow. I'm gonna have another breakfast.
I don't think this is like the railroad system at all. When they built those railroads, you could actually buy a train ticket and USE them. I'm curious as to how anyone could use the Dark fiber that we now have a glut of.
Without the equipment on both sides lighting it up, dark fiber is useless.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
'Investing in railroad companies (RC) cannot be wrong,
because they are the future'.
What about replacing RC with FCC (fiber cable company)?
Go to your local Amazon store and read and enjoy The Devil Takes the Hindmost.
here's an account we should all be able to use.
cowboyneal2001
cowboyneal2001
A one banana problem.
Another tip: If your connection is slow, try taking other devices off the telephone line.
Sometimes old phones or answering machines have an electrical component called a capacitor placed across the telephone line even when the phone is not being used. This will limit the speed of your connection. Just unplug the telephone or answering machine or bell or other device to test.
Bush's education improvements were
"rest easy that you have helped build the future and inspire innovation."
;-)
I thought Microsoft already took care of this for us!
I hate to say to those company works:
There are many companys and mans are part of backbone... you are using today....
Transmission Equipment manufacture (how many NYT)
Fiber Optic Cable manufacture (how many NYT knows)
Sub-contractor construction (how many NYT knows)
more.. I do not NYT would want to know
etc..
I agree there is a lack of content, which results in people questioning if they need cable or xDSL. This results in reduced demand and retarded adoption of broadband services. This IMHO is what has lead to the drop the share value of JDS Uniphase, Ciena, Corning, Nortel, etc.
So, if content is needed then consider that ISP's pay for bandwidth used to deliver their content. In addition the local carries are charged for the bandwidth needed to deliver content from their uplinks and/or backbones.
Webmasters also deliver content. It is delivered from the servers they run. However they are not paid in general. Could this be why the dot.com sector is dying? Could this be why there is a lack of content?
If a local carrier is willing to pay MCI Worldcom for the bandwidth needed to deliver content into their system, then why aren't they willing to extend the same offer to the webmasters who create the content?
In a nutshell:
content: webmaster -> {telco_cloud} -> isp -> customer
money: webmaster -> {telco_cloud} <- isp <- customer
You can never have too much fiber. Here in sweden 95% of all fiber in the ground are dark/unused. We could easily provide Gigabit Ethernet or 10 Gigabit Ethernet in the future to everyones home if the operators that owns the darkfiber wasnt so greedy and charge highprices for the unused fiber they own.
Think of what kind of internet and applications we could build if everyone had unlimited bandwidth. My stinky 512 Kbit bandwidth-capped broadband service from the national telco Telia at home cant even do streaming internet television. It sucks!
Maybe your Uncle Julius has told stories about how he could have bought half of Nevada for $1.50 way back when. It was all just worthless desert in those days, but now it is called Las Vegas.
Your uncle's tales may be worth recalling, now that we are faced with a glut of long-haul fiber optic lines installed by companies eager to cash in on the Internet boom. Something like 100 million miles of these lines were laid in the last two years, and the great bulk of this capacity is unused.
For investors who put up the estimated $35 billion to pay for all this, it has been a disaster. Many companies involved are awash in red ink, and bandwidth brokers report plummeting prices for long-distance telecommunications capacity. Even worse, such a presumably gross misallocation of capital is bad for the entire economy; had the money been directed more profitably, output and employment would be higher and everyone would be better off. Now that the economy is weakening, America is starting to look like a high-technology Gulliver, tied down by costly Lilliputian threads of glass.
But was this really such a wholesale misallocation? Will society really suffer for the misguided enthusiasm of fiber optic investors and entrepreneurs? History suggests not. Again and again, investors have gone hog wild over new networking technologies, spent a fortune to install them and found themselves with vast overcapacity and ruinous competition. Yet eventually the capacity was always used, often for purposes never foreseen when it was installed. And in the long run, the economy was the better for it.
"The turbulence in this market is entirely predictable," said Richard R. John, a communications historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He noted that the American telegraph system was unprofitable for its first 15 years, and that in the early 20th century many felt that it had too much capacity, partly because it was built to accommodate huge peak loads during business hours. At first, the telegraph network was not used for what would become a main function: managing the railroad system.
"Almost all of the big-mileage railroads, once you get west of the Missouri, were built in advance of demand," said Maury Klein, a University of Rhode Island historian. Despite serious investor losses, a staggering increase in national wealth would result. "The rail network completely transformed the West," Professor Klein noted. "It created cities where none existed, and businesses where none existed."
Long ago, the railroad historian Julius Grodinsky summed up the process in words that would apply just as well to fiber optic networks today: "The story is typical of a growing industry in its pioneering stage. Competition then and now works itself out in a similar fashion. Some businessmen gain, some lose -- but the public benefits."
In another example, the parkways of the New York area were built to give city residents a way to reach outlying beaches and state parks. But these roads also abetted the suburban development boom and soon were filled to capacity with commuters.
There are many reasons to believe that the vast new fiber optic network will similarly call forth unforeseen new applications. Adventis, an information industry consulting firm in Boston, predicts an "inferno" of bit-burning applications once high-capacity networks overcome the last-mile bottleneck -- the delay in hooking up a high-speed Internet network to homes or businesses. If that happens, it will not be the first time that communications overcapacity turned into a shortage. When telephone numbers were first allocated, who imagined that we would ever run out? And once upon a time, a million shares was considered enormous volume on the New York Stock Exchange.
And that misallocation of capital? True, the money could do something else as we wait for all that bit-burning. But history shows that this is the American way. Many European postal systems, telegraph lines and railroads were built with government money, and sometimes with insufficient capacity. But in the United States, instead of burdening taxpayers, we sell investors the equivalent of high-priced lottery tickets each time one of these technologies arrives.
The proceeds from these speculations -- the capital paid for stocks and bonds -- may seem misspent. In the long run, the results are called infrastructure, and they are what economies are built on.
I don't think this is just an American phenonemon.
I live in Barcelona, Spain, and there are six different telcos putting fibre optic cables in the ground outside my office window as I type this.
Like many countries in Europe, Spain has gone from an inefficient state-owned telecomm monopoly to hyper-competition in just a few years. I have ADSL at home at the moment - it was really easy to get installed and the monthly fees are very low. And with all this competition it should get better really quickly.
Do you realise you are violating the DMCA?
Cisco last week said that they are starting to see a stabilization in their sales and expecting things to look up by end 2002. What I wonder is with all of the
I mean I would expect that the telcos had upgraded their infrastructure and was coping with the increase in data transfer across their networks from all of the flourishing
So do you think that Cisco's claims are basically fortunetelling and isn't really based on truth? So then comes end 2002 and they will be still suffering along with the rest of the optics manufacturing industry and will see their stocks plummet again.
I knew I would get on topic somewhere!
The problem being that while the railroads were and still are vital to the economic development of North America, by some measures no railroad in NA has ever earned a return on investment. Even the best-managed roads today (e.g. Norfolk Southern) are barely turning an operating profit. And the harder they try, the more money they lose.
Which, come to think of it, sounds pretty much like the situation in the data communications business right at the moment. The only difference being that since investors are a lot faster to pull the trigger on businesses that they perceive as having poor future returns, the telecomm companies will probably never get the chance to establish themselves that the railroads had 1860-1920.
So what happens when all the money pulls out, and all the telecomm providers (except the RBOCs) collapse?
sPh
My stock options are worthless...
The stock price lost 90%.....
BUT I Believe in Nortel...Great company in a bad time. Amazing technology.
"It's technical in a psychometric kind a way" -- C. Parish
I just heard some sad news on TV, apparently Slashdot website creator, Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, was rushed to the hospital this afternoon after having his penis sliced off. Authorities say the accident involved Rob's penis, his computer, and an illegal computer device imported from China that was designed to stimulate the penis during cyber-sex. The authorities aren't releasing many details yet as to how it happened, but they suspect that the device malfunctioned which caused his penis to be sliced off. However, there is speculation among the Slashdot community that the Open Source Operating System "Linux" is to blame, for its faulty structure and lack of professional development. There is no word of whether there was any foul-play involved from hackers amongst the Linux community.
When you have to operate a business (running trains) over a vast territory, you have to have reliable, foolproof and positive communication to synchronize the operations of all those trains.
Proper communications were essential to avoid those dreaded "cornfield meets" (head-on collisions).
Railroad signalling also has been a cutting-edge environment too; signal interlocking plants (where complex railroad junctions are controlled) have been from the start crude mechanical computers, where conflicting train routes are avoided by mechanical (then electric and now computerized - but with extremely wierd and exotic kinds of technologies) computers, all to boost safety.
Actually, 100 years ago, railroads were the high-tech industry, and it is striking to see the parallels between the railroads 100 years ago, and the computer/internet scene today...
I just heard some sad news on TV, apparently Slashdot website creator, Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, was rushed to the hospital this afternoon after having his penis sliced off.
Sounds like he misread and misattributed my signature.
Tisk...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What's extremely interesting, is that the government subsidized initial railroad developments. Hundreds of thousands of acres were given away for free to railroad companies, and many of them failed! But a failed railroad company leaves behind tracks, and so the railroad system was built.
The difference between now and then is that instead of being entirely government subsidized, venture and stock capital are what helped to lay fiber across America and the World. I predict that, within the next two decades, fiber will become commonplace; not run to our houses -- are railroads run to your house? -- but enough so that any neighborhood will have at least a T3 backbone. (Yes, I know that it's a lot easier to run fiber than it is railroad, but I think that you can't expect everyone to get modern wiring (telephone and electic), much less fiber. Rural people and people who live in poorer areas will simply be treated worse. That socioeconomic problem will persist regardless of bandwidth, though. More well-to-do neighborhoods will most likely get an OC-3 at their doorstep, but the average guy in Newark, New Jersey or Gnaw Bone, Indiana won't.)
Ever optimistic,
Mike Greenberg
http://www.yourmothernaked.com
I mean with the mass production of cars and trucks; how much do we even need rail? All it takes is one guy tampering with the tracks and we all go tumbling off the tracks together!
We've seen a similar article, different conclusion:
5 24 3&mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/06/25/163
To be honest, I think the NYT article is telling us just what we want to hear. The above referenced article reminds us that there was a lot of useless rail capacity built on speculation. Which way si ti going to happen? We'll be sure, it's going to be good for the rich people, and it might be good for us working stiffs.
What's interesting about connectivity is that cities make sense again.
When the railroad was invented, cities sprouted up along rail lines. These are the cities that got big. Previously you had to be on a major water way to get big.
When the car was invented, personal transportation was possible. This allowed the creation of the suburbs. Which ruined the city.
Now that data connectivity is critical, a city makes sense again. Big cities will spring up around fat bandwidth. They'll need connectivity out to other cities, which is where the glut is. Then they'll need fat connectivity within the city.
Detroit was one of the hardest hit cities by urban sprawl and the automobile. Now Detroit is evolving again by putting in 100Mbps-to-the-home connectivity within its downtown area. People are flocking to lofts, apartments, and condos in the downtown.
Hey! Doesn't John Cougar (Mellencamp) have a big spread pretty close to Gnaw Bone? I bet they get fiber in there pretty quick...
mtngrown, who actually knows where Gnaw Bone is...
"I mean with the mass production of cars and trucks; how much do we even need rail?"
During the 1970's, shippers in North America tried to switch everything over to trucks.
Sometime in the 1980's, two things happened: (a) railroads improved their efficiency (b) someone did some simple division and realized that for shipments over x miles (I forget exactly, but it is around 500), transport by rail has about 1/20 the cost of transport by truck.
So since 1990, about 90% of long distance, inter-city tranport again moves by rail (not to mention coal and the Panama Canal bypass, which are separate issues).
Most of the small sidetracks and short lines are gone, though, giving the impression that there is less rail than in the past. In terms of tonnage, not true.
sPh
In comparing the fiber glut to the railroad boom, let's not forget the dark side of history. The construction of the railroads enabled the massing of enormous fortunes for tycoons such as Pullman, Carnegie, Morgan, Vanderbilt, and Gould -- all names both famous and infamous in American history. All of these people, and many others whom I didn't name, were ruthless competitors, satisfied with nothing less than total monopoly and willing to use any means to accomplish this.
Such means included bribing government officials (even entire legislatures), sabotoging competitors' operations, illegally appropriating land through manipulation of the legal system, paying workers rock-bottom wages while showing reckless disregard for basic safety, and firing and brutalizing workers who had the temerity to join a labor union.
Perhaps an ominous reminder of all this, many cables today are in fact laid down alongside (you guessed it!) railroad tracks.
what the HELL are you saying?
My cat's breath smells like cat food.--R. Wiggums
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
The people in Appalachia and other rural areas do not see any shortage of Broad-Band.
As a suggestion, we should lobby our congress-critters to put some $ into expanding Broad-Band to rural areas, as well as generally expand IT in the Public Sector. Besides helping underserved areas, it makes sense as a Fiscal measure to stimulate our anemic economy!
First off, as another poster mentioned, generally inflated stock values help the next company's IPO in that sector.
The upward trend of price makes people willing to work for (very little + stock options); and until you have the big price drop they normally keep working there. This can save a company a lot of money.
It makes it easy for them to buyout other companies in a stock swap. CSCO did this so successfully they're getting sued.
There are intangibles too, it generally makes it easier to push around your suppliers and buyers the bigger and more important they think you are... so, for instance, you can demand Net/30 and pay on Net/120. And people want to go with your product, because you're so successful and your stock price indicates you're going to be around for the long haul... false, of course, but it works.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot