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."
The reason 95% percent of lines arne't being used is because that would create more bandwidth, and lower the cost of said bandwidth and the phone companies wouldn't have the justification of hosing you monthly.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
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.
I live in HIGHLY rural area, consisting mostly of lakehouses used as weekend getaway accomodations.
At the time, I thought that the installation of fiber in my front yard might eventually lead to allowing me to get a really high-speed broadband connection. To this day, however, if I were to call Bellsouth, the best they could offer is an ISDN connection, as DSL is unavailable.
But, I guess that it leaves Bellsouth's options open for the future.
Fast-forward 30 years, and they were all running at capacity. The fiber is there, it's not going to go away. 5, 10, maybe 15 years down the road, someone who picks it up cheap now will make a fortune off of it.
--Dave
Even applying conservative estimates to costs of construction, the companies spent more than $570 million laying long-distance fiber cables across Oregon, and they shelled out at least $265 million more equipping the 5% of fiber that is used
It costs almost 10 times as much to light a fiber as it does to lay it according to these numbers. Most of the cost in laying fiber isn't the fiber itself, but the labor and the property rights involved in doing it. So, you may as well lay 95% more fiber than you really need because you might need it some day and it doesn't cost you that much more. You'd be insane to try to terminate all of those fibers though since they cost so damn much.
Furthermore, bandwidth is a matter of supply and demand, and as long as demand isn't increasing, increasing supply will force down prices and make your business less profitable. Let's say everybody started needing DS-3 speeds into their home. Somebody would come in and offer that speed for a hefty premium, but as demand for that service built up, people would come into lower the prices to get into that market. Eventually you end up paying the same amount for your DS-3 as you did for your DSL and you've got a few more of those fibers on the coast glowing.
The problem is that there's nothing driving bandwidth demand substantially above what it is right now. Most people will tolerate modem speeds, and those that won't are mostly pretty happy with DSL or cable. A few of us want more bandwidth, and because we aren't the majority of users we will have to pay handsomly for it. As long as the majority of users are content with the bandwidth they have there is no incentive to expand their networks.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
The post to which I am replying is one of the few posts here that demonstrates an actual understanding of the economics involved in laying and lighting fiber.
To expand a little bit: Most of the existing fiber was laid in the "build it and they will come" dot-com era. There's a huge amount of it primarily for two reasons: (1) there were a lot of companies doing it independently--all hoping to get a big chunk of the bandwidth pie, and (2) when laying fiber, it makes economic sense to lay a lot of it, because (as pointed out) much of the cost in laying fiber is in the process of laying the fiber (lots of digging, etc.) and not in the actual fiber itself.
We now know that "build it and they will come," one of the assumptions of this business model, didn't quite happen--or at least didn't happen as quickly as what these companies' business models predicted: The voracious demand for long-haul capacity just isn't there today. Also, as a direct result of this capacity glut, the price (and profitability) of long haul bandwidth has decreased much faster than what these business models depended on. There's simply way too much supply. As for the companies that haven't yet fallen by the wayside, they're lighting only a fraction of the fiber that they own, simply because that fraction is capable of carrying the bandwidth that the company is currently able to sell.
Another thing to keep in mind is that almost none of this fiber is "last mile" (if any of it is at all). It's all comprised of "long haul" routes, e.g. connecting NYC and DC. So if you wanted to lease a dark fiber route from one metro area to another, you probably could, but it's not like the bandwidth companies are prepared to light up an OC3 to your suburban residence.
Finally, another key issue seems to be ignored here: IT COSTS MONEY TO LIGHT FIBER. Lots of money. The optical equipment itself is very expensive, and of course there are the operational costs of managing a transport network. Just as airlines don't want to spend money to fly empty planes from city to city (they still have to pay the crew, maintenance costs, fuel costs, etc. regardless of whether a flight carries 1 passenger or 100), bit pipe companies don't want to spend money to manage additional fiber when they aren't even saturating the fiber that they currently have lit.
Of course, it's also possible that the telcos have already run fiber to everyone's doorstep, but they're holding out on us because they want to "hold the man down" or for some other nefarious reason...
Cheers,
Jeremy
I had a discussion with the other geeks in my office a while back about how fast we can ramp up the expectations of high-bandwidth amongst our customers. We came to the conclusion that it is likely to be many years before the high-bandwidth-everywhere (I mean more than 1 megabit per second) to all homes and all businesses cheaply.
Here is why:
1. Assume you can light all that fiber and run it effectively around the world
2. Connect the last mile
3. Now that everyone has the capability, route the traffic
After all this, we came to the conclusion that dial-up is here to stay for the duration of our careers; unless traffic is routed in a fundamentally different way than it is now (more efficiently) or a revolution in router technology happens so that a router box capable of handling the traffic becomes dirt cheap, really small and fiber ready out of the box. Otherwise, no ISP will ever be able to afford the routing requirements alone of high-bandwidth for everybody even if the fiber is there and lit.
Any one of the steps or sub-steps can be a difficult problem to solve. Though I would like to see it, I am convinced that the broadband for everybody will be a slow (decades) and painful process.