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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."
I'd dig it up and sell it on ebay
I have great faith in fools; My friends call it self-confidence. Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1845
We should either:
1. Take donations from the open-fiber community to purchase these lines and turn them into open source peeer-to-peer Bluegrass mp3 and ogg file trading networks
2. Turn Oregon into a large Beowolf cluster and assign it the task of figuring out how to decentralized the Internet the Al Gore Invented
3. Dig all the lines up and make the worlds largest light-brite
4. Ask Microsoft to buy into a Ma Bell and bury enough copper lines to nullify the use of the fibers
pm
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Untapped fiber resources? What a find! Colon blow for everyone!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Maybe we can remove all that useless fiber, and use the conduits as oil pipelines, to move oil around the country...
(many of the pipes were originally burried with the intention of creating an oil backbone for the country, an idea, which never took off.)
I work for a largish non-IT-oriented organization that recently had a committee to allocate fiber bandwidth between various parts of the organization. Each part send a representative to stake out the fiber they needed - or, more appropriately, felt they ought to have. The fire department said they need at least 4 dedicated pairs at all of our hundred locations; police needed at least 6 pairs, etc. Grand total was that if you followed their numbers, we would need over 200 pairs for the whole organization (with only 10000 employees) when in all likelihood the needs could be served with 1 pair.
They had so much fiber, their whole company went down the toilet.
Choose not the dark side of the fiber, for dark fiber leads to constipation, and constipation leads to *ZWONNNG* *GLITCH* (sound of a muppet getting its head lightsabered off)
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
...'dark fiber' that stuff that comes out of your butt after eating bran muffins?
Shortly after I moved into my house, almost five years ago, Bellsouth paid me $400 so that they could lay fiber along the roadside in my front yard.
You should have asked for a drop to be installed that you could hook into, and waive the $400. Pay them routing fees, and be straight on their tier. You just need to negotiate better ^_^
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
What's hilarious is we are referring to the "DOT COM boom days" like my grandparents referred to their childhood... and the boom days were only 3 years ago!
"Grandpa, what was it like during the DOT COM boom days?"
"Well, back when I was a kid, it was like there was no end to the fiber. As far as the eye could see, we laid fiber. Day and afternoon. On the way to work at the crack of noon, I would hop into my company provided BMW and lay fiber. On the way back, I laid more fiber. Did I mention it was uphill both directions?
"Nowadays you kids don't get have to lay fiber so much. You kids got it easy."
"Look! There! Evil, pure and simple from the Eighth Dimension!" --Buckaroo Banzai
All of these problems could have been avoided if people had used my plan to install Pnumatic tubes instead of fiber. You just put a few tapes/disk/punch cards in a canister, and ... WHOOSH! - it's there. Fiber can never match that kind of bandwidth. Sure some will complain about latency, and we were having trouble integrating our last mile TCP/IP over carrier pigeon solution, but all cutting edge tech has its share of problems.
[dubya]: your cs server was sooo laggy that last game
[agentX]: well it must be those AC geeks from slashdot pulling on our fibers again.
[dubya]: well, I'll pass a law about that imediately. Nobody interrupts my fraggin'
[agentX]: okay, new game
[dubya]: yay, fraggin
[dubya] has quit("There must be limits to freedom" G.W.Bush,1999)
btw people, for politically incorrect cartoons, check Elftor .
If you are "Grandpa", fiber has a different meaning.