Slashdot Mirror
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."
This article is just a reminder of how wasteful people were back in the DOT COM boom days. I'm sure that stories like these can be run in many major US cities. It just makes you think.... How much stuff is out there that is just undocumented? How much wasted technology is out there that will never be found.
Johnkoerner.com
I just don't believe "those evil phone companies" are causing the fiber to go unused.
I'm sure the exectives sit around in smoke-filled conference rooms coming up with clever ways to keep technology out of the hands of people and make LESS money by NOT selling it. Give me a break.
Phone companies will light up the fiber when it makes fiscal sense to do so. Nobody, ESPECIALLY not a phone company who would stand to profit significantly from cheap fiber, is purposely NOT using this stuff.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
When you get down to it, the American people paid for those lines in terms of all of the stock lost in the now belly-up telecom stocks, so we should get something back. Huge bandwidth seems fair.
Only problem now is getting some company (or even the government) to make some use of this infrastructure before it's obsolete.
Maybe if the government points out that it's anticompetitive to hoard fiber with no intent to use it that they'll sell it to us at more reasonable prices.
Then again, I can keep dreaming. Thanks Michael Powell.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
This is old news. Companies laid a lot of fiber at once knowing it wouldn't be used immediately. Given the cost to lay the fiber relative to the cost of the fiber itself, this is not unreasonable. The fiber is not lit currently because the tranceivers are very expensive.
Vote for Pedro
Much of the problem has to do with the short term needs of bandwidth providers. Many are bankrupt, those that are not still require substantial investment in better "end-point" equipment - routers, switches, hubs, etc. A chaotic telecommunications industry that is at odds with Internet systems (ATM and X.25 vs TCP/IP) is also creating uncooperate rivalries that makes it harder and harder to make efficient use of what's available.
The end result is that we are allowed to use 5% of what could be available without substantial further investment. Caps and per-byte billing is popular in a way it really ought not to be. These entirely unnecessary caps and metering charges immediately destroy many potential benefits the Internet can bring, from being a remarkable force for the distribution of new works of art (music, films, etc), to a point-to-point person-to-person network that far exceeds anything the telephone could have brought us.
Defeating this quagmire of untapped bandwidth and short term commercial interests destroying the long term viability of super high bandwidth digital communications it will not happen by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that you're concerned about the clampdown on bandwidth use that's happening at a time when there is clearly a bandwidth glut. Tell them you appreciate the efforts of telecommunication companies to open up bandwidth in this area, but that in the absense of unlocked resources and free (as in speech) use of what's available, you will have to find less secure and intelligently designed alternatives to the Internet. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how arbitrary caps and per-byte charges destroys all three. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on his or her policy on opening up bandwidth.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
The goal was to connect Silicon Valley to Redmond Washington, and to allow better access to Asia via their undersea fiber.
But this quote tells me that it will not soon be used:
If they need the remaining 95 percent of the fiber in the future, companies will have to spend tens of billions of dollars more to make it usable by placing lasers and amplifiers on the route.
The returns on an investment like this would have to be pretty damn high to make anyone pursue it. And right now, the returns are almost all negative.
Examples include farming (hence we actually pay farmers to grow nothing), steel (at least now), oil (otherwise OPEC wouldn't set production quotas), and, yes, bandwidth.
To follow your argument, why then AREN'T the phone companies selling the extra bandwidth? It isn't the demand - I would like some cheap bandwidth. It isn't the lack of fiber - as the article says, there's a lot unused. It wouldn't be that hard to tap, especially since most consumers would be willing to pay for reasonable install costs.
No, the reason is the phenomenal price drop that an increase in quantity would bring, nothing more. And you're right, it's not about "evil" phone companies - it makes good sense to do what they're doing. I've never known a company want to DROP their prices, certainly.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Japan has been laying dark fiber for over 10 years now. Many were laughing at them during that time, but today, we have a 100 Mbps fiber internet connection coming right into our kitchen! For something around 100$ a month. Ok, not super cheap yet, but affordable, specially if you share it.
Five years ago, the top for end users was still 56 kbps modems, that was just the begining of ISDN. Pretty impressive evolution.
Now question: if dark fiber is there, why is it that you still can't get decent DSL internet connection in the US? What's hindering the development of broadband there?
I code, therefore I am.
If you were burying water mains and other city services into a new house subdivision nobody would be surprised about the city buring enough capacity for a 100 houses, even though only one has been built just yet.
Most of "dark fiber" articles out there fail to see the same rationale behind the large amount of dark fiber out there. This is proper planning. Network traffic has been doubling every two years or so, this means that 90-95% dark fiber would last you about 6-8 years.
This is perfectly sensible. In fact, if we had to rebury fiber within 6 years of paying billions to rip open downtown Manhattan I would fire my provisioning manager.
Of course DSL is unavailable, it's a copper only connection between you and the colo
Cheaper technologies, like wireless, might well leap ahead of fiber in the race to more bandwidth.
This is what we deal with smack in the middle of fly-over-country USA.
While I've negotiated for over a year with several idle fiber network owners (who still expect rates greater than what the ILEC charges, yet requires me to sink hundreds of thousands of my own capital to build out their fiber to markets where it's usable), we've resorted in nearly every case to tower construction, licensed microwave DS3 deployment, etc. (Funny, we're cheaper *and* faster than fiber, yet have more than enough capacity to feed small towns).
I've argued the concept of "sunk cost" until I've been blue in the face - no good. Many of these guys came out of ILECs and have a fantasy about "price = cost + 40%", rather than understanding "price = what market will bear."
Blame it on too many laid-off Bellheads going to work for network companies.
I think most telcos think of the fiber network as their backbone, and they don't really market it as a service for business.
I think it's more of a "we won't sell anything less than our cost+high margin price." Funny though, nobody's taking.
Perhaps the little wireless companies that are growing strong will have some nice post-bankruptcy networks to buy penny on the dollar.
*scoove*
I could buy some unused fiber, and my business would run drops to peoples homes. Can you say "OC12 in the living room"?
No, I can only say OC-12 in the NOC downstairs. I can say STS-12c in the living room though.
But have you ever heard the phrase "last mile problem"? The plethora of "Dark Fiber" expose' stories never seem to mention that the excess potential bandwidth is on the backbone. Getting from a well-connected site to your living room is still an expensive proposition.
The curious thing (at least what I find curious) is that the cost of running a 10 or 100M ethernet connection to your home is not that different from the cost of running GigE, or even STS-x (1, 3, 12, 192) to your home. It's the same economic situation that led to the 95% dark fiber pipelines -- WHAT is in the ground is a negligible cost compared to the price of getting it INTO the ground.
--
It takes a lot of money to light up each end of a fiber strand. If the 5% that's lit cost a couple-hundred million to do, then the remaining 95% would cost tens of billions.
That said, it's an absurd figure to toss out. Nobody is interested in the cost to bring ALL of the dark fiber up to full capacity -- of COURSE that would cost a lot of money -- but it may be of interest to, say, double the capacity usage in a given pipeline/trench.
--
Wire is inert if it's not attached to anything.
Fiber optic is massively efficent, but if I shine a flashlight into it in seatle, they aren't gonna see a light in silicon valley, even IF there were no splices or connectors (Which, I assure you, there are). Hence they need signal amplifiers, and routing stations and technicians and hordes of other expensive crap to make all this line functional.
Tens of billions is probably on the high side for what it would cost to get it running, but to keep it running? Cheap.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The fact that your post was modded +5 Interesting says something about the readers here at slashdot these days.
So how does the ownership of these lines pass on? Can just anybody take the existing lines, plug in, and make use of them - or do they have to be bought?
You're kidding right? Someone always owns everything, nothing of value is unowned. What, you think when someone goes out of business they just lock the doors and walk away, leaving a building full of inventory, office furniture, and whatever intact? Typically they go bankrupt, filing chapter 7 (liquidation). This means all of their assets are sold off and the creditors get the proceeds. This means someone is buying their assets, and dark fiber would be considered an asset by most. So no, you can't just use some defunct company's dark fiber.
If there were one large company that could buy out and connect most these unused lines, they could probably make something out of them. Since they're just sitting unused, I'd imagine it wouldn't cost too much to buy ownership
It was exactly this sort of thinking that put so many companies out of business to begin with.
Casca
Yes! If anything, the poor economics of lighting this dark fiber is an indication that its owners do not hold a monopoly. If they had a monopoly, they'd simply raise prices until these projects became economical for them so they could recoup their otherwise stranded investment.
Broadband isn't making money because the bandwidth to support high-speed connections is expensive.
I think it's a little of both. If they light up the fiber, they can make more money on it for a short while, but as bandwidth is more available, the prices most likely would go down. Then they have higher maintenance costs on the same income they had several years before.
As it stands, they can stretch it out for years to come - only lighting fiber as they start hurting for bandwidth - and they can factor out fiber-laying costs from future operations.
Thanks to some over-zealous fiber-laying before the bubble burst, there was plenty of "worthless" fiber, which was scooped up - almost free money.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
This article is just a reminder of how wasteful people were back in the DOT COM boom days. I'm sure that stories like these can be run in many major US cities.
Actually, this article is just another case of the media being sensationalist while either completely misunderstanding the situation or deliberately misconstruing it to hammer it into the current propaganda "template".
Virtually all of the fiber is SUPPOSED to be dark at this point. It's a side-effect of minimizing cost. Consider:
If you're going to do, say, a national fiber backbone network, you have to run a fiber loop around THE WHOLE COUNTRY, plus runs back-and-forth to hit all the major non-edge cities. As you go you lay conduit in the trench, pull fiber through the conduit, and splice it.
The cost of the fiber is NOTHING compared to the cost of the trench. You can put a WHOLE BUNCH of fibers in a single jacket, so the cost of the pull is the same. The cost of the splices is non-trivial and part of it is per-fiber-spliced, but it's STILL tiny compared to the trench.
So, how many fibers are you going to pull and splice?
It takes two fibers to make a section of the link, one for signals each way. That pair of fibers can carry (at the current top-of-the-line rate) about ten billion bits per second. That's 129,024 simultaneous uncompressed phone calls, or over a gigabyte/second of data traffic.
Now suppose you were only planning ahead for a couple years, and figured one pair would be enough. So you only buried one pair. And you got enough customers signed up IN ADVANCE to just about fill it. And you went to hook it up and found that somewhere between SF and LA there was a break. Are you going to dig up a third of the west coast again to fix the break? Of COURSE not! You're going to bury EXTRA FIBERS in the first place, and use a spare fiber. But suppose you have only one spare pair and your main fiber is full - that's 50% dark fiber! CNN Headline News screams "Half the fibers in the country are dark! Oh, the waste! Oh the horror!"
But do you, as the visionary building a network, think that the traffic is NOT going to increase in the future? If it doubles next year, do you want to light up another fiber? Or DIG ANOTHER TRENCH?
So of COURSE you spend a few extra percent up front. You bury a BIG BUNDLE of fibers. (You also bury a few extra conduits, so you can pull more, or rent-or-sell one to some OTHER networking upstart who wants to pull his own fiber, once you're safely established.)
So you're going to have a bunch of extra fibers. But how many do you light up? Answer: As few as possible. The boxes to light them up are NOT cheap. (Repeaters aren't muchFigure 1/8 million for a minimal TDM only box, over a meg for for a fully-loaded router.) But (unlike digging trenches) they are subject to Moore's Law improvements. Wait 18 months and your suppliers can get you twice the bits for the buck. So you buy expandable boxes (again to save costs later) but leave most of the slots empty.
And now you have most of the fibers dark, until the traffic expands enough for you to buy more cards and shove 'em into the boxes to light up the rest of the fibers.
So you have MOST of your fibers dark. And even reserving a few for spares you can light up most of 'em with paying traffic. But HOW MANY should you have?
The common wisdom at the time was that the Internet bandwidth needs were growing by a factor of 10 per year, and would continue that way for a while. If you have 95% dark fiber now, (and the bright fiber is at capacity), in one year you'd have half of it lit, and in another three months you'd hit the wall, and be frantically throttling links, upspeeding them with new technology, and getting out the cable-pullers and trenchers again. The bandwidth glut becomes a bandwidth crunch.
Turns out 10x/year was a myth, based on the explosive growth for the first couple years after the Internet was opened up to general users. The actual number is closer to 2x - which means today's 95% dark fiber means we don't have to get out the pullers and trenchers for a bit over a decade - and maybe longer if we go to higher speed over existing fibers.
Same situation in the metro networks - except that you're talking about digging up ALL THE STREETS OF ALL THE CITIES, TOWNS, AND VILLAGES. Then doing it again in a few years if you didn't lay enough up front.
It just makes you think.... How much stuff is out there that is just undocumented? How much wasted technology is out there that will never be found.
This is well known in the industry. It's just that the media are clueless.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Look, here's the deal with broadband.
#1 - mindspring makes 3 times as much from Dialup as they do from dsl. why? telco charges for dsl hookup. why? threat of VOIP? bottom line, broadband is not profitable.
#2 - AOLTW made more from dialup business than any other part of this huge conglomerate company. why? dialup is profitable.
#3 - the media industry is afraid of broadband and file swapping, and too afraid to embrace it in an intelligent way.
#4 - the cable/sattelite companies are afraid of broadband
#5 - the phone/long distance companies are afraid of braodband
There are lots of people who will have lose their perch when 100MBPS optic fibre lines are standard in every living room, and they're going to resist that day as much as they can. If they're lucky it will never come, in the USofA that is.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
"Personally"? No. Collectively? Of course.
I always find it odd when people are sarcastic about companies' "conspiracies."
Do you think companies *DON'T* have meetings where they discuss how to keep prices "healthy"? Do you think they don't hire lobbyists to sway lawmakers? Do you think they don't try to drive the competition out of business? Of course they do.
They plan, and budget, and lobby to make things go their way. And meanwhile a certain type of consumer sits back and says, "whatever will be will be, and deservedly so."
OF COURSE they are trying to screw us over. Greed is the muscle inside the invisible hand, if you will. The consumer's job is to get educated and work against it.
They'd probably laugh at you. There's no way you can pay what the telco would charge for a fiber connection to your doorstep. Nor could you afford the equipment you'd have to put on your end.
Although holding out on them might have resulted in a doubling or tripling of the money they're willing to give you for the inconvenience. After all, it would cost them substantially more to go around your property.
On the other hand, this $400 may have been a goodwill gesture; it's possible that whether or not you want the cable laid under your lawn, that's where it would end up. Depends on the city I guess.
And why the hell should they have to do that? Why shouldn't Joe Sixpack be able to run his own damn webpage on his own damn computer? If cable was charged by usage they'd make more money too.. so what's your point?
Are you being paid by the turkey that said no one needed more than 640k of RAM?
Supply and demand don't happen in a regulated monopoly environment. Tell me, how many "broadband" providers do you have to chose from? How many sets of wires come to your house? I've got all of one choice, the local cable serviceless ISP. No servers, DHCP, upload caps, the whole crapy works. DSL is something the local Bell is using their "availability" list to strangle and is simply not available, despite my being in a well populated Unversity town. Yep, I've got dial up and I realize what I can't have. I can't serve pictures to my family, I can't do voice over IP, I can't do web cams. The network is there, I was willing to pay $45/month to use it. The local telco and cable company made it so I could not have one and the other one was not worth the money. They can go bankrupt for all I care. My communications needs will be met by a dial up, but I resent the extra effort I'm forced into and I resent the people who thought it would be better for them.
Strangley enough, I agree with you on one point. No one should be giving their money to any of the abusive providers of "broadband". Folks like canadaisp earn their service fees and don't ask much for it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What was it Gate's once said? "512k is enough for anyone" or words to that effect? If you look back even 5, 7 years ago, a gigabyte was massive, 3 1/2 inch floppies were still quite useful, and DVDs were either non-existant or about as popular as laserdiscs. Computers are an excellent case study of the human race expanding to fit its boundaries, toppling the walls, and them going further. No matter how much capacity there is, its never enough. Shortly, someone will fill that 10M/s line, and want more. (and AOL will find a way to fill it with ads and spam even faster.)
As for $150/mo, with the cable bill added onto (strictly monitored and capped) internet its almost that high already. 10mps would probably happily render portions of cable tv obsolete.
As for the pay-per-use concept, its probably only going to expand, as the rest of reality already works on that system (successfully or not, they use it none the less).
And... that's my rant for the day.
Gnomez