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Dark Fiber: A Case In Point
Anonymous Coward writes "CNN has posted a story regarding the overabundance of fiber lines that were laid during the 90s gold rush along Oregons Interstate 5 corridor. While over 140,000 miles of fiber has been laid 95 percent of the fiber goes unused and roughly half of the companies who laid the fiber are now gone. The article goes on to further say that even with all that fiber, there is little availability to the consumer because either the local connections aren't there or, because of monopolization by phone companies, too expensive. Even for businesses."
Quest has a fiber line within a 3 minute walk of my house, but the only thing close to affordable is icky AT&T Cable, as far as I know.
"A case in point?" What does that mean? Why is this even news? A bunch of companies did some stuff and went out of business, but the stuff they did is still around...film at 11? And "case in point?" Huh? What is the "point?"
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Does anybody have any maps of the layouts? as I am sure some intrepid /.ers could produce a very nice (if technically illegal) fiber network to play with.
Economic Left/Right: -0.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.69
OK, you obviously didn't read the article... Most of the fiber is owned by companies that simply don't exist any more.
Huge bandwidth seems fair.
Wow. You know what's not fair?... I haven't had power in a week due to an ice storm. Life ain't fair, fucko. Deal with it.
You wanna make a mint? Go borrow a few hundred million dollars to buy fiber and start your own company. Until then, shut the hell up about "anticompetitive" practices.
I'm so incredibly sick and tired about people whining about "this company ought to do that becaise I think it's a good idea" or "this company is evil because of this". Jesus Christ. That's why this country is so great. If you see a place where a company is making a stupid decision and isn't earning money from it, then you have every right to jump in and tackle it yourself. In other words, put up or shut up.
In order for this type of argument to work, you have to make an assumption that demand is a constant. While this assumption is arguable in the case of food and gas, it's totally invalid in the case of bandwidth right now. If bandwidth became cheaper, a large population of consumers would increase their usage, thus making bandwidth a viable market to be in.
The other flaw with your argument is the assumption that dark fiber would not be very hard to tap. Transmitters, receivers, routers and last mile connections are all still prohibitively expensive and are obstacles to widespread deployment of broadband.
There are just too many players/potential players in this sector for the 'conspiracy of telcos' argument to work.