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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 think that the telco monopoly is half the story. Fiber is still expensive to access directly, and still expensive to lay out in a LAN, as the CNN article points out. Cheaper technologies, like wireless, might well leap ahead of fiber in the race to more bandwidth. I think most telcos think of the fiber network as their backbone, and they don't really market it as a service for business. This is a situation where the "last mile" is still the problem-- fiber is not laid for the whole network.
Always look on the briight side of life! (whistle, whistle)
Actually, the local paper ran a detailed article about this (I live in Portland). This is not a phenomenon that is repeated in other cities; rather, due to Oregon's I-5 corridor being the conduit between San Francisco and Seattle (Redmond) it was assumed by dot-coms that there would be tons of traffic to handle and profit from. Obviously it didn't pan out. And since those companies didn't provide the amps to light the cable, it will cost billions to fire it all up - and that ain't happening any time soon. But it does explain in part why OR/WA have been hit harder by the recession, with plain old unrealistic optimism.
Well you can buy all the fiber you want. The ITC I work for made a LAN extension that went 7 miles. The dark fiber cost about $8,000 to dig. Then we had to buy $10,000 modules to go into our switches. This is for a LAN extension. If you want to be a DSL provider you better be able to shell out a hell of a lot more (we have paid over a million). That is why it costs so much for broadband, if we got all of our stuff for free we could lower the prices, but we don't so we can't.
..."Fiber-Optic Overdose Racks Up Casualties" back in May of this year. One quote:
Telecom wouldn't be the first to go through such a boom-and-bust cycle. During the railroad boom of the late 1880s, so much money was invested building so many parallel tracks -- or tracks to places that would never support profitable service -- that the entire industry went bankrupt. Much the same story is told of the airline industry, which because of so many losing years has yet to turn a net profit.
Interesting stuff--go read!
Laying far too much fiber is a pretty sound financial move. Laying fiber is expensive. The fiber itself is cheap compared to the cost of gaining the rights to bury cable along a continuous stretch of land, and then actually digging the trenches, laying the cable, filling the hole back up and fixing whatever is at ground level. The theory goes that, as long as they're in there, they should lay insane amounts of cable. Whether or not they're laying the cable from the right points A to the right points B I can't say, but the fact that it's dark or insufficiently used doesn't necessarily indicate that anybody screwed up.
-Waldo Jaquith
I grew up in Oregon and only moved just recently to the East coast for work. I can tell you, just because fiber runs down the Interstate, it's no wonder it's still hard/rare to get broadband in most of Oregon.
Phone company conspiracy theories aside, Oregon is anything but flat. Houses are not close together (generally). One of the things that makes Oregon nice is the country side, open space (I know, hard to imagine sometimes if you haven't seen it), and the ability to live more than 5 feet from your neighbor. Other than the larger cities like Portland, there's really no housing developments or sub-divisions to run fiber to or at least not enough to entice phone companies to bother with running the lines over/under whatever terrain.
I think that's one of the main reasons the Personal Telco Project in Portland is really taking off and will continue to do well. Cheap or free blanketted wireless (able to cover several miles, not just a few hundred feet like current 802.11) is the only way I see a lot of homes in Oregon ever getting anymore than a dialup connection. It's just not practical to lay fiber down one person's mile long driveway. We didn't even have local dial up internet access where I used to live (45 minutes west of Portland) until '97 and even then it was 14.4!
I worked at Bell Labs for a few years. After that experience, it doesn't puzzle me how telcos can have a monopoly, more
captive customers than they can handle, and still "loose money". It's not lost, it's looted. In front of the building (in Holmdel NJ),
a limo would sit for a half hour or more waiting for the Pres. of the Labs to arrive by helicopter. The copter would land, the limo
would drive him 3000 feet to the door, then take off. Amazing.
The primary concern for management was getting the latest org chart to see their progress up the pyramid. I was a bottom feeder/
consultant and I think there was at least 25 levels of management between me and limo boy. No wonder Lucent is in the shape it's
in. An army of talent, led by a crush of PHB's all trying to move up the food chain.
It was a constant cycle of projects started, brought almost to the point of completion and then boom. A new manager, a departmental
re-org, and all of the work tossed in the dumpster, deleted of of the machines because they were allocated to another department, or
just left to rot. Everyone had stories about how cool this or that project was and then got cancelled. Very few stories of successful,
shipping products. Look at what happened to Unix! They couldn't even figure out what to do with it. Tossed around until it was finally
sold off so they could make the numbers for the quarter.
One bright spot, they did have pretty good coffee.
As the article itself states, optical fiber can be laid out with excess capacity rather cheaply,"usually with two or more companies each stringing dozens of strands of fiber within the same piece of conduit...."
The big cost in laying fiber is not in the optical fiber itself, but in digging the ditch to put it in and in lighting up the fiber at its end. $570 million was spent laying the fiber, $265 million was spent lighting up just 5% of that.
Businesses went broke because they were overly optimistic in all that fiber being lit up quickly, not because they sunk too much money installing the fiber in the first place.
In a few years or decades, as broadband becomes more ubiquitous, that backbone netwrok of fiber will get lit up.
It's fair enough to blame the local providers, paricularly the incumbent phone-service providers, for being slow in rolling out broadband. But it also should be noted that these companies still need to make money and have been slow in rolling out broadband because it is a service that requires an expensive initial investment to provision and the technology has only recently started to approach the maturity to be provided inexpensively to the end user.
evanchik.net
Well, in all honestly, the assets of the now non-existant companies were probably sold off, and that fiber would be part of the assets. Now, whether the company that bought the fiber can do anything with it is a whole other story.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
The same irrational call-to-action has been posted several times in the past few days. An irrelevant bit about SMP on OpenBSD seems to have become a permanent part of it too. See karmawarrior's posting history.
I've been running more than 7 miles of fiber (single mode) with a pair of cheap fiber-to-ethernet-transcievers (costs something like $200 a pop) at each end without any problems at all.
:)
This was more than four years ago.
Today the transcievers are even cheaper.
The problem is that people _think_ they need expensive stuff. Most of the time, that's not the case. Time for some guerilla networking
"Why do you think General Motors has recently put triple zero incentives on 13 SUV's. Why do you think Ford Credit (170 BILLION in the hole) continues to offer zero financing? Why do you think stores have clearance sales at the end of each season?"
Because those are all tried-and-true old-school strategies that increase revenue from consumers while making them belive that they are saving money by spending money?
I really love the car sale example. They show you a "dealer invoice" and negotiate on that, leading you to believe the dealer will actually be selling the merchandise to you for less than he has already paid the manufacturer. Mind you, this is all imaginary money (except yours!) They're not selling it for inventory cost, they're selling it for "dealer cost" which is just a function of sucker price.
My formula for a new car offer is the insurance appraisal value for a price. Same for real estate. If a piece of property appraises at $80,000 but the list price is $280,000 there is something wrong -- and I DON'T CARE if someone else will buy it.
When I moved into the SF Bay Area 7 years ago the only "broadband" available was ISDN. It wasn't an option since it might have cost almost as much as my rent due to the per second (yes, you read that right) charges on top of the monthly flat fee. Then @home started making lots of noise and wasn't available to most people. They priced themselves fairly low and still never became available to me or most of the people I know. Then came DSL. No, it wasn't available to me either because I live so far from the CO. Eventually IDSL showed up and was only expensive, but I could actually get it. So, my first broadband connection was costing me around $150 per month and by comparison to ISDN it was cheap! Then Northpoint went out of business and I got screwed by AT&T when they decided to not continue service to Northpoint customers after buying their assets. (but I'm not bitter - no really) So much for IDSL since nobody offered it anymore.
But now there appeared a new wireless service that said 256k symmetrical and it's available to me. Sure thing! Now my broadband was down to $99 per month. Cool! And they even gave me static IPs. Life goes on nicely for some time.
Just because I'm curious (and was told by Pac Bell each time I called about it previously that they were going to upgrade the CO near my house to make DSL available "next year") I call Pacific Bell to ask my yearly question about when I can get DSL. A mere 4 years after I started asking I suddenly get "it's available to you now". Not just the lower end of the spectrum, either. It seems that Pac Bell really HAS been upgrading their COs and now I can get any speed connection I want. Oh, and 5 static IPs. For $79.95 a month. My broadband gets even less expensive.
So what's the point of all this? It's that (at least for me) broadband connections are becoming more available, higher speed and less expensive.
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
Umm... If you re-read that article it states that to 'light' the 5% of the fibre it cost $255 million dollars. To Light the other 95% the costs would be in the low billions. Considering that there is probably 5 million people in Oregon, that would amount to around $2000 per capita to light the remaining 95%.
.com, dark-fibre was the currency for the telcoms. There wasn't much financial bankground to the idea, but what did that matter if your company now was capable of 100 gigabits between seattle and san francisco?
So... what happens once we've lit, does everyone get 10 gigabit internet connetions? No! No one gets squat because the fibre isn't connected to anyone.
The reason it was laid down, was that some company's (Worldcom, Global Crossing etc) were able to re-sell dark-capacity to other startups. These company's were able to report massive revenues from selling unused fibre. Thus, more and more company's started up trying to tap into this market. Global Crossing and someothers did oceanic fibre, but others stayed closer to home. They raised money, planted dark-fibre then tried to sell off their dark-capacity for revenue. But... it was just a pyramid scheme and they all went bankrupt.
Just as 'eye-balls' were the currency for
Un-lit fiber is useful..
I used to work for a company that layed out city networks all on ATM backbones (ip over l2 atm network.. it works GREAT). As for all the people who whine/complain atm is to hard.. get over it.. read a damn book ATM w/PNNI rocks, nothing like having multiple redundant paths to anything.. think of it as a layer 2 OSPF..
As for the dark fiber.. somethings cables get hit, accidents happen.. the extra fibers in teh bundle provide some safety from broken cables. Fiber itself is cheap, so lay a ton and utilize it in the future.. the surveys, land rights, pole rights, documentation, engineering is what's expensive.. same with the lights at the end of the fiber..
oc-48 not fast enough.. go OC-192.. DWDM helps too.. it's not like ethernet where you gotta run new cat-6 cable.. just change the interfaces and go.. as long as you laid good cable in the first place you're generally ok.
most POP's are pretty complicated in their fiber layouts the last thing we need is to be splitting pairs to drop some fiber for an ethernet extension to some farmers house so he can get email.. That's what wireless/modems are for..
We have no use for the dark fiber.. so really.. it should stay dark.
The largest reason for dark fiber is the emergence of Dense Wave Division Multiplexing aka DWDM. In simple terms, it allows one fiber to carry many times the normal bandwidth by combining different wavelengths of light at the source and splitting them out at the destination.
This isn't that the bandwidth isn't necessary. It isn't corporate profiteering. Its simply VCs investing in infrastructure without realizing that technology advances would soon render it useless.
Having 95% of the fibre dark is NOT wasteful --- it's smart investing. Let me explain.
What is the single biggest expense in laying fiber? Digging trench.All those rights of way are expensive, and those guys in hardhats with the cool digging toys won't work for stock options.
What is the second biggest expense? lighting the fiber. All that hardware at both end is expensive, and it's support staff expects to get paid every month.
Once you are laying the first cable of fibre, what is the additional cost of laying an additional fibre? not much.
Once you've decided to lay fiber, the economically rational move is to lay as much fibre as you think you might ever might ever need, becuase laying more fibre later will require you to dig everything up and do it all over again. Don't light any particular strand until you've actually got paying customer -- the cost of the boxes drops with Moore's law.
The problem is not the too much fibre was laid, it's that too many different companies invested in fibre creating a buyers market for the customers. Given the current demand, even if each company had laid only a tenth of much fibre, we'd be in the identical place: same costs, same prices, same bankrupticies. However, when bandwidth demand catches up (and it will someday, I assure you), you'll be really glad all that "wasted fibre" is there.
Put another way, if you lay a small amount of fibre, you are doomed to lose - by design, you've only got a small amount to sell. If you lay a lot of fibre, you might make a lot of money because you've haven't spent much more,and you'll be able to sell a lot more if/when the demand does turn up.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
Unrestricted bandwidth exists, it just costs more. Nobody's willing to pay that price, so they offer cut-rate bandwidth with restrictions to lower its value.
Operating fiber lines is not cheap. The energy it takes to power the light beams has a noticible cost. The mistake that a lot of the boom-era telecom companies made was laying down more fiber lines than they'd ever need, and then running out of cash before they could afford the equipment to light them up.
The major telcos didn't go around buying up the unused fiber to let it sit dormant. It's sitting dormant because nobody wanted to buy the fiber assets of the bankrupt boom-era companies.
If you want to supply the rest of the equipment to light up the lines, I'm sure the bankruptcy courts and/or creditors of the defunct companies would be glad to hear your proposal to buy assets which right now are valued at near-zero because nobody's willing to take them. The problem is, the telecom market is so bad off there's no takers.
Is that the fiber in Oregon this article is talking about is mostly along I-5. The original article that this story came from had a map showing where this fiber was laid. This map showed that with the exception of what the BPA had laid down, there was practically NOTHING connecting all of this fiber to the rest of the state, whether it be Bend (which is a growing high tech center) or smaller towns that fear they are doomed because they can't afford to lay & light up a network of a dozen miles back to this glut of bandwidth.
Think of it this way: these companies built several eight-lane highways linking Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and points south; they didn't bother to build more than a handful of interchanges each of which at best feeds a total of a single lane of traffic to them. This fiber will remain dark for a long, long time.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p