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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
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.
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.
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"
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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
roughly half of the companies who laid the fiber are now gone
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?
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
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.)
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?)
Big Telcos bug me. They charge like hell and yet they are always crying about losing money (Last time I checked atleast, could be different now). On top of that, they are a monopoly, how can they lose money? Ick. Greed. And for me, well, I can't offord to start my own local independant telco, so thats the end of the story.
Can all fish swim?
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.
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.
They had so much fiber, their whole company went down the toilet.
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
Shortly after I moved into my house, almost five years ago, Bellsouth paid me $400 so that they could lay fiber along the roadside in my front yard.
I live in HIGHLY rural area, consisting mostly of lakehouses used as weekend getaway accomodations.
At the time, I thought that the installation of fiber in my front yard might eventually lead to allowing me to get a really high-speed broadband connection. To this day, however, if I were to call Bellsouth, the best they could offer is an ISDN connection, as DSL is unavailable.
But, I guess that it leaves Bellsouth's options open for the future.
Actually, the local paper ran a detailed article about this (I live in Portland). This is not a phenomenon that is repeated in other cities; rather, due to Oregon's I-5 corridor being the conduit between San Francisco and Seattle (Redmond) it was assumed by dot-coms that there would be tons of traffic to handle and profit from. Obviously it didn't pan out. And since those companies didn't provide the amps to light the cable, it will cost billions to fire it all up - and that ain't happening any time soon. But it does explain in part why OR/WA have been hit harder by the recession, with plain old unrealistic optimism.
..."Fiber-Optic Overdose Racks Up Casualties" back in May of this year. One quote:
Telecom wouldn't be the first to go through such a boom-and-bust cycle. During the railroad boom of the late 1880s, so much money was invested building so many parallel tracks -- or tracks to places that would never support profitable service -- that the entire industry went bankrupt. Much the same story is told of the airline industry, which because of so many losing years has yet to turn a net profit.
Interesting stuff--go read!
Japan has been laying dark fiber for over 10 years now. Many were laughing at them during that time, but today, we have a 100 Mbps fiber internet connection coming right into our kitchen! For something around 100$ 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.
If only the owners of the unused fibers would sell them. What a great business idea that would be.
I could buy some unused fiber, and my business would run drops to peoples homes. Can you say "OC12 in the living room"?
I wish...
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
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
--
nich
37 - what does it stand for really...
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!
The bottleneck is not on the internet; it is between the POP and the average consumer, who is generally too stingy to get a faster connection than dialup.
/. via a PC so much any more, as it is about sexy stuff like streaming video, and VoIP, and its about half a dozen devices in your home with a full connection to the outside world. I don't think its to far fetched to think that your average home in the future will require (and use) 10 or 20 times the bandwidth they use today.
:)
I really don't see stinginess as the reason there. Virtually everybody I know that still uses dialup does so not because of money, but because the service still isn't available to them. At least in my city, there is still way too much copper in them thar lines...
Wireless solutions are taking over the last mile.
Yeah, but wireless is still insecure, and relatively slow. All the providers know that fiber into the home still remains the holy grail of the industry, so to speak. Its not about reading
Its like my grandfather used to say, good fiber is never wasted....
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In the end, none of this matters. The Telcos own us, the fiber lines in question and fiber lines like them are lost to the world. American politics (laws are influenced by money) and corporate cash pits will insure that the telephone and cable industries will remain as they are or get worse.
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.
Just what I was thinking... if the companies that laid this fiber have gone out of business, it might be like abandonware fiber... If no official entity jumps up and says "Hey, that's my fiber!" someone would just have to find it and utilize it :)
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
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.
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Dang, and I thought this would be about Darth Vader's Metamucil substitute. Oh well.
I know from personal experience and from conversations with telco executives that there are many dark fibers in transatlantic cables. They are there for backup, and for gouging -- I mean "future upgrades." And despite the massive amounts they charge for data, these companies are all in trouble. Serves 'em right. $10K per month for T1, and they didn't back off of this for years. Die. See if I care.
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
Since the companies that put it there are no longer around, who owns them? I mean, what would stop someone from tapping into it. Or did ma gobble them up for $.000015 a mile only to not use it. Where's my any-media-ever-produced-any-time-I-want-it-for-nex t-to-nothing? Huh, where is it. I was promised in the early 90s by many many commercials that by now we'd have this. I don't see it. Someone has some explaining to do. What was it they said...and the company that'll bring it to you, ATT. I wonder if I google search for and image of thier CEO with his pants of fire I'll find it.
I live in Washington state, in a small rural town called Omak. Years ago there was a huge hype on bringing Fiber into Okanogan county.
Thousands where spent to lay this fiber, Miles upon miles of fiber. It's been in place for some time now, and is being used by the one local ISP who pushed for the fiber.
Though as in the subject of this article, a majority of the fiber is dark. We have OC-192 capacity, of which at least 2 Megabits is being used. Perhaps more, but not much.
Now, the people who pushed so hard for this fiber are fighting it, trying to lay fault for the expense and misuse of at the feet of various parties involved. All of this blaming in the midst of a community lagging behind in the digital age.
Computational Madness in a round package.
Most likely that dark fiber will be therE, but will it be ready to be lit? What are the failmodes of fiber? Even if the fiber is glass, what about the cladding?
Is this stuff going to rot, get moldy, or in some other way become non-functional over the long run? In every place where dark fiber is buried, is there light fiber as well? If a buried bundle is completely dark, how do we know it hasn't been interrupted by Joe Weekend Backhoe, who knows he hit *something*, but also knows that no neighbors have complained?
Maybe the dark fiber can be lit in another century. I'd like to know lifetime factors before putting any money down on it.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
What's the cost of, say, 1000 feet of Cat5 Ethernet cable? Now, what's the cost of the switches, routers, and other such equipment to make use of it?
Now, multiply that by lots, and you have the problem with fibre. Little glass tubes? Cheap. Nifty laser equipment and what not to do neat things? Expensive.
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Somehow I don't think the old 1. Buy all the dark fiber; 2. ???; 3. Profit! plan is going to work, no matter how much you spend on each ?.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
" Network traffic has been doubling every two years or so, this means that 90-95% dark fiber would last you about 6-8 years."
I thought that was one of the lies that Worldcom used when cooking its books. After all, if this was really true, why did they run out of money?
And even if you somehow believe this mathematical improbability (you'll find that real systems don't display exponential growth often, and when they do there is an asymptote), why would a company making so much money from the traffic not lay enough to last for 40-50 years of future growth? It costs a whole heck of a lot more to dig the trenches (permits, equipment, men) than it costs to buy a bunch of fibre to be buried, as you point out!
So while it is proper planning to bury more fibre than you need today, but the rest of your post is complete hogwash and lies.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
First off, laying fiber is -expensive-, in the thousands of dollars/mile. So when runs were mapped out, even if they planned on actually -using- only 2 strands of fiber, they would go ahead and lay a bundle 'for future use,' because it'd be more cost-effective than laying new fiber in the future. And we're talking usually a bundle of at least 8, and that's for a low traffic area (ie, on the far west side of Salt Lake Valley, with only 2 buildings spliced into the particular loop I mapped, no residential, and very sparse commercial). In downtown areas, a bundle of 16 is on the slim side.
Secondly, most of you probably don't know how difficult is it to work fiber optic. You don't just 'tap in,' you splice into a specific strand that has to be active on the telco end (most buildings are connected to a loop at two separate points, for redundancy in case one 'loop to building' leg gets severed), and you have to have the optic hardware, which is certainly not cheap. For fiber optic splices, things must be -precisely- done, ends ground and capped within very narrow tolerances for error. And if you think Joe Sixpack has trouble with CAT5...
And so, you have the price of laying it (which is why there's so much dark fiber in the first place, it was laid when the future actually looked bright), the price of hardware, the price of labor and expertise to tap into even an existing loop...
Yeah, the average consumer is likely to NEVER see him/herself with a fiber hookup, no matter how much 'dark fiber' there is...
There's no wrong way, to eat a Rhesus...
I don't see stinginess as the reason, but I can understand why some people would think so. The people I know who use dialup generally have other options available. However, they don't see a reason to trade their $10/month dialup for a $50/month cable/DSL connection. If the content isn't worth $600/year, people aren't going to pay.
Let's face it, the only reason the current content requires the higher bandwidth is because most web designers don't design for their audience. Every day I see pages (& emails) which waste bandwidth for no reason. For example, I just saw an email yesterday that used light blue text. It was an HTML mail. The HTML which was included was *HUGE*, but all it did was turn the text blue. The message would have been easier to read if it was sent as plain ascii. Now, who in their right mind is going to pay $40 more per month to read blue email?
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.
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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."
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.
My mother runs a public library. I was "exploring" the basement, and came across a funny looking metal rack with a bunch of telco wires coming out of it. Sliding the drawer open revealed tons of unconnected fiber. :)
I asked my mom about it, and she said that when the local telcom (SWB) had laid fiber somewhere part of the deal was they had to run dark fiber to all the public schools and libraries in the district.
Of course it's useless now (as I suspect most of the fiber the telco actually wanted to lay is) but you better beleive I keep an eye on the price of the head end equipment. In a few years, my mom's library is gonna rock. Well, at least for kids looking for books.
I wonder if there are a lot of these "bonus" runs around the I-5 route?
I would really like to point out that the US has fallen so far behind in broadband services compared to other countries. I was looking at a Japanese magazine the other day and there was and ad for ADSL 12Megabit service to the home for around 1995 Yen per month, about 17 bucks! A few people have commented about, who needs dark fiber besides telcos and realted companies? I can think of several companies related to the entertainment business. I used to work at Warner Brothers Studios and we had a few OC-3 and a few OC-12 circuits interconnecting various facilities. We shared files, and provided a host of services to other divisions. It was great.. it was a part of a grander scheme at the studio,but thanks to the merger with TBS. The project was canned. This is just one example of how dark fiber can be used, granted that not everyone has the requirements of a motion picture studio. But you're only limited by your creativity. I am very frustrated that dark fiber isn't more readily available. I can think of so many uses and potential useful business that would make great use of dark fibre..But it's financialy not feasible.. Unfortunately, the telco monopolies are fat, lazy and their own financial problems, are a result of their own ineptness. ARgh!
Come on, this is hillarious. Even if it isn't funny to you (what, are you 300 lbs), don't mod it offtopic. I don't want quality stuff like this falling below my threshold!
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.
--reality is *some* places it's real hard to lay fiber or cable, other areas it's just nota all that hard. I watched them bury new phonelines here at the house, roughly a 1/3 mile up the driveway, didn't take them 15 minutes from pulling up with the truck, off loading the trencher and having that new line right to the box on the house. The extension around 100 yards out to the RV space they did with a smaller walk behind trencher, that took around 10 minutes. We had the entire road out front about 1.5 miles worth get tore up this summer for widening, it trashed the buried phone line, I kept a piece I found as a souvenir, heh, anyway the telco came out the next day and had the total distance completely re-run and connected and I was back online in a coupla hours. They ran right down the side of the road with the big driveable trencher, it's fast, it's just not a big deal in some situations.
It just depends where ya are. The bottom line is the fiber is there and needs to be lit up. Local governments could decide to seize it eminent domain, then put it up for bid. I understand the equipment can be pricey, well, so is everything else that is only made in limited runs. I got old computers here cost thousands in 80's dollars, computers got cheap from orders and demand, this fiber optic stuff won't get cheap until there's some demand, and the demand won't get there until this fiber becomes available for outside companies to use. Catch 22 there. With all the tech industry layoffs, seems like maybe someplace somewhere some company can come out with the model T version of the equipment to use fiber optics. That part I don't know but electronics have gotten to the point it's ridiculous cheap, VERY generally speaking, all it needs is scale. People would buy it if it was there, you can't buy what ISN'T being offered, so there's no way to tell what the real demand is. I'd love to have a broadband offering that does it all, TV, telephone, net access, letting me host at home, etc, it's just not avaialble. As it is now got separat telco bill, separate dial up modem bill, want any decent tv you have to get a satellite system, like why? If I could get all that one one decent cable line somehow, it would be worth buying and I bet there's millions of more people out there could see that as well. The bulk of the nation still has about zip for ANY kind of broadband. I'm right at the last few feet for *possible* dsl copper service, but at 300$ install and no way to guarantee it will even work then another 100$ for an alleged "sorry, windows only" modem (they are clueless at local telco, origianlly they had the nerve to insist I couldn't connect to their dialup on a mac! for real! I had to tell their "tech support" how to do it) and then 80$ a month for real slow kbps they can byte me. Theyare gonna lose a customer to wireless as soon as I can get it, so instead of maybe 100$ a month for a total integrated broadband package that really is decent that they might can get from me they are gonna get *zero*. Great forward thinking business plan on their part. Uh huh.
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
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.
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
I keep seeing people saying, "Yeah, there is lots of fiber laid but its too expensive to lite." I just saw 2 working 24 x 100mbit ethernet -> OC3 programmable hubs go for $45 each at a state surplus auction. How much does it cost to rent a closet in some commercial building that happens to be near a backbone? I bet I could easily make the closet rent + electricity + maitenence back just by selling service to the local isps here stuck on 7 T1's and then some. I smell something fowl, and I don't think its me.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
So, when are people going to start hacking into the dark fiber to create their own bootleg high bandwidth networks? If the companies that laid the fiber aren't using it, they'll never notice...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
for dark fiber leads to constipation, and constipation leads to
Grunt---pppbbbbttt---THUNK!! Starship fuel!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
There's so much dark fiber running all over the U.S.!
Vyvx, a petroleum company ran hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber through old oil pipelines. Along most every railroad right of way, you're likely to find lots of dark fiber.
There may be upwards of a half a million miles of the stuff unused. The only saving grace is that eventually some part of it will probably end up getting lit.
I had a friend who owned a medium sized ISP back east. Around 1996 he asked me how to grow his company (he had about 15k subscribers at that point, virtually all dialup). I told him that it was time to take the plunge and either become a major coast to coast player or else get bought out by one. He got bought out by Winstar who put millions into his IP, only to declare bankruptcy and sell back to him at pennies on what they paid him in the first place. He was a lucky one. I wonder what would have happened if he had decided to become a major player. He'd probably be broke. Instead he has some decent $$ in the bank and he's gone back to his smallre roots.
where is the need for OC-148 to homes?
In my pants, that's where.
It wouldn't be that hard to tap, especially since most consumers would be willing to pay for reasonable install costs.
This is not fiber to the home. Consumers need capacity to the home, and that is different technology.
This fiber is along the highway, long distance capacity. It costs thousands of dollars to put fiber in the ground. It costs millions of dollars to put those nice OC-192 Terminals and Repeaters on it to make it carry data. The telcos simply don't have the transmission equipment to light it up. You give them the equipment and I'm sure they would be more than happy to light it up and sell the bandwidth.
Why is there is so much unused fiber? It costs the same to put one fiber in the ground as it does to put one hundred fibers in the ground. The cost is in time and digging equipment. So they plan ahead and put lots of fiber in the first time so they don't have to go back and do it again later. It was not planned as capacity at the time it went in, and not budgeted for transmission equipment. It was easy to do it "Just in case."
If they chose to sell the fiber itself, it would have to be to someone who had the budget to light it up (back to those million dollar equipment cabinets). They probably don't get too many buyers for that reason.
Dark fiber does noone any good. It is an asset that is not producing revenue. If there was any way to get money out of it, someone would be doing it. That is good business. (And since when does good business == good economics)
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Even file-sharing tech. takes into account the ping times, to try to get files from hosts that are "closer" in terms of latency, so neighborhood wifi and lilyponding take care of most of the mp3 & video sharing.
Doesn't it make more sense to save the long-haul stuff for low-bandwidth-requirement communications, such as posts to /.? :-)
All this boils down to, is that, aside from ISO images of the latest linux distro (which is handled more efficiently over a neighborhood wan than it could be over everyone hitting the same poor mirrors every release), there's not that much reason to light up more fiber, at least in the next decade. Even video-on-demand is being roled out at the local level, not the national level.
[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 .
Go visit the local bankruptcy court. They'll be happy to introduce you to the rightful owners of some of the dark fiber, banks who gave loans to the late-90s telcos that didn't quite make it. The banks would gladly sell that fiber to any entity willing to make a reasonable offer. They've got an asset that's meaningless to them and nobody's placing bids on anyway... they'll be happy to sell it for less than cost.
Yep, so all you need to do is to get that 10's of Billions in VC to pay for the equipment, with the promise that over the next 20 years the profits from the fiber lines will pay off the original investment. Afterall, Internet usage doubles every year... right?
Oops. We've made this mistake alrady.
Oh, you mean like greed? Like they don't want to let go of their $/minute telcom monopoly and broadband everywhere would allow anyone anywhere to video conference for $40/month instead of the $250/month AOL claims they can rape you out of? You think ATT is going to give up their usual rape? With a combination of wifi and broadband everywhere, who would need a cell phone?
There is no way the people who laid that cable could forsee what happened to "broadband" and the 1996 tellecomunications act when they were planning thier networks. With a few abusive moves, the baby bells have killed their competitors. With a little malice, ATT killed excite@home. With no sense whatsoever, the Bush administration forgave them. Better to have a few companies you can rule than many that might constitute a free press. There's no technical reason for port blocks and DHCP over cable and DSL, in fact it costs extra money to deny you the abiltiy to serve. There's no reason for modem caps, but the FBI will come and get you for it. No, these stupid greedy tricks were unimaginable in 1996 and they came one stupid trick at a time. Could they have possbily seen that it would get so bad that someone like me, with five freaking computers up at all times, would move from cable modem back to dial up?
Out to get me? Nah, out to get everyone. Don't think for an instant that you will not be hurt by this. You and I will continue to pay absorbadent long distance fees or just not use the services as planned. More importantly, every other business that is not Ma Bell's bastard child will pay those fees too. Every business needs communications and they won't have them. That costs money and you will pay when thing just don't get done.
With the comming of the comercial rainbow of 802.11b, and open access point being declared terrorists, I have see that things are going to get much worse before they improve. The universities will fall last, but they will be controled too and that will be that. The whole promise of the internet as a peer operated imposible to control or destroy collection of computers sharing resources and information will be turned into the big corporate billboard you have to pay ma Bell to view. Call it TV++, Tee-Vee-double-plus.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That's insightful? It misses the point that the freaking fiber is everywhere and that's the expensive part of the network, duh! A little extra equipment could have DSL or better in that whole neighborhood, and you know that it would pay off if only some greedy company like BellSouth were not sitting on it and waiting for all of the DSL companies to die. BellSouth wants nothing to do with the next generation of technology. They want to sell you long distance voice service and have been applying to get it for years. Now, despite proven anti-competitive practices, they will be granted that. The fiber will rot before BellSouth uses it, and I have to question if they actually laid it.
I know the damand for DSL exists in Baton Rouge because I've been waiting for more than a year for a slot to open in my neighborhood. I had it but moved less than a mile away - did not change equipment area. When I got to my house I was told by BellSouth that there was no DSL. So I started to cancel my service with Telocity. Two weeks later, suprise suprise, a BellSouth employee calls me to offer me DSL! I told him I'd have to get back to him on that one, and immediatly called Telocity to see what I could do. They informed me that by agreement they could not just transfer my account from one location to another - it must be formally killed and restarted. Needless to say, DSL was not available when the formal process was over and will not be. BellSouth keeps the "availibility" database and has obviously abused it. I can be sure that there's a little mark next to my name in that database that says, "wants alternate service, never offer."
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
You know, like the 1996 telecomuncations act that required the baby bells to open up their equipment to competition? Rember that? Competition making things better? Oh, I see, you work for Microsoft, never mind.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Supply and demand don't happen in a regulated monopoly environment. Tell me, how many "broadband" providers do you have to chose from?
Well personally I use Speakeasy DSL because they have competitively offered me a package that lets me do what I want with the bandwidth and I pay a premium for that. I could use AT&T cable, or SBC/Ameritech DSL. I could get internet over a satellite. I can get DSL through a number of sources, though as far as CLEC's go, I've got 3 or 4 choices.
Granted, I live in Chicago, and so I get a lot of choices. In your situation, does it really make sense for the local bell to not offer you DSL services in the long run? If they have even a chance to charge you another $40/month, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to assuming that the costs for their infrastructure isn't going to be higher. The problem may be that, for whatever reason, it will cost them more to lay out the infrastructure in your area than they expect to make on DSL service.
The question you have to ask in citing the "monopoly environment" question is this: what possible benefit does their monopoly gain by NOT giving you DSL service?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I now use a linux friendly ISP, CanadaISP that earns their measly $10/month. Yeah, dial up sucks.
What are you able to do with your $80/month service? They let you run mail server? Web? The local telco? Right, even if they did, it's just not worth it to me.
I've got $40/month for the first person that lets me use the wires hooked up to my house.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ummm, whatever...
"With a little malice, ATT killed excite@home"
Excite@home died because they couldn't make any money selling broadband.
"With no sense whatsoever, the Bush administration forgave them. Better to have a few companies you can rule than many that might constitute a free press."
Bush does not "rule" the telcos. Even if there were more telcos, it would not constitute a "free press," as this issue has nothing to do with the free press.
"Don't think for an instant that you will not be hurt by this. You and I will continue to pay absorbadent [sic] long distance fees or just not use the services as planned."
Long-distance fees have been dropping for years.
I'm sorry to hear that Chicago is down to three or four providers. The plan was for six to chose from.
BellSouth wants more than $40/month and they don't want to let any other company to get in and get by charging just that. It's simple, they've used spurious "competition" to losen their regulatory burden but kept just enough to screw their competitors. When it's over they will be able to screw everyone, or so they think. It's funny what happens when your lines run over public property.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
For the big cities and towns, is there any reason not to pull fiber through the sewer system?
They're doing it even as we post. The fibers themselves are perfectly happy to run through sewers. (Splices, and the people who make them, are a bit more problematic.)
Of course you'd PREFER to run it thorugh a conduit where you don't have to be hip-deep in running shit to work on it.
And most homeowners would PREFER to have somebody string his fiber-to-the-home in a new conduit-to-the-curbside-box or down from a pole and through the wall than up the 30-years-of-shit sewer pipe and out a floor drain...
But it can be done. And it may be desirable if the price is right.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Not only might the material itself decay as you note (though I think that unlikley), far worse is that fiber grows obsolete too! Over time newer fiber materials are developed that can handle more traffic over a single strand, at higher speeds - and able to carry that all over longer distances.
All of that means that the old fiber, even in only a few years, might be totally useless because the cost of the electronics when using brand new fiber would be far less than lighting up the old stuff (need more electronics on either end, and more repeaters in-between).
Enough companies laid conduits that more than likley new fiber would just be blown through and the old stuff either ignored or pulled. So the conduits themselves might be worth something someday... perhaps. In cases where cable is buried without conduits, you can just forget about it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
- Watch video.
Of what? There's still no good solution for streaming first-run movies over the 'net (Movielink is a first step, and a small one at that). I'm not aware of any major broadcasters making a lot of content available, either.
From where? The costs of serving up 300kbps streams are so high that many outlets (e.g., CNN, MSNBC) are charging for their content. Who's gonna pony up for fatter streams? Servers and access cost $$.
- Share files.
What kind of files? You better believe copyright owners would focus more on file sharing of their intellectual property if it were super easy.
- Voice service.
Current residential broadband service is just fine for voice. Granted, the upstream can't handle multiple simultaneous sessions without significant compression, but the current broadband access speeds will handle VOIP for a while.
How would you store the data that would stream down the pipe? Big hard drives are cheap, but we would have to redefine "big." 250GB wouldn't last long.
Without question content will come, and uses would pop up that we haven't even thought of yet. But I just don't see the need right now.
I'm not being critical -- just curious. What *would* you do with 10Mbps? How much a month would you pay for it? It wouldn't be cheap. The companies that spend the bucks to lay the pipe and hook up will need to make money. Would you pay $150/month for super high-speed Internet service?
-Ray
The internet would have grow 10x per year if end users can get 10Mbits up and down for $20 a month. Just think what people will do if they can download and upload at 10Mbits
The current bandwith and price actually slow down the economy and telecom
Quite. And that's what we call the "last mile" problem.
Running a bundle of fibers thousands of miles across forests, streams, deserts, and mountains is expensive.
But running A HUNDRED MILLION fibers, coaxes, or high-quality twisted pair bundles a hundred to two thousand feet, through some of the most expensive and built up real-estate in the world, to a hundred million separate endpoints, costs an ASTRONOMICAL amount of money. And then you have to undersell a competitor who ALREADY HAS a copper pair or coax INSTALLED to most of homes in question. That's copper that was already paid for, back when he was running a regulated monopoly (or bought the bankrupt cable company).
The backbones were built at least partly on the assumption that the a cheap last-mile broadband connection would be available. It seemed reasonable at the time: DSL and digital cable were already working. Local phone service was being deregulated and competition was expected. Killer apps were already being developed that would result in mass demand for broadband: Digital broadcasting, digital audio and video content distribution, audio- and video-on-demand (central archive "movie rental", "jukebox", and time-shifted broadcasts), internet telephony.
But the regulatory regime created an incentive structure that broke it all:
1) The ILECs (Incumbent Local {phone} Exchange Carriers) were simultaneously allowed to provide DSL and required to lease cheap copper to their own competition (both DSL and phone) at price-capped levels.
2) The cable companies ended up in the hands of a couple media conglomerates.
3) Copyright was expanded.
1) is why DSL is nearly a phone-company monopoly, with monopoly-style service and prices.
The ILECs had, decades ago, installed copper to service the number of phones they expected to be installed - assuming the pair would be used for phones and they would remain a monopoly carrier. The copper wasn't all suitable for even 1Mbps downstream ADSL, while the stocks were already running low (with everybody installing extra phones for modems, FAX machines, and the teenage kids...) even before they had to rent 'em to the competition at below replacement cost.
So as the good pairs ran out, guess whether the ILEC would rent the remainder to a CLEC or give it to one of its own DSL customers. And if they have
to install new ones and are required to rent them to their own competition at less than cost (making up the difference from their own customers' bills), of COURSE they won't install any more.
So DSL is pretty much stuck with the existing pairs until the rules change. The ILECs get the good pairs while the CLECs get maintainence trouble (including "disappearing pairs" when an ILEC installer steals one for a new ILEC customer - then the ILEC repairman steals a DIFFERENT one to complete the repair call on the first, and loop forever). Thus almost all the CLECs are dead (a notable exception is Covad, which renegotiated its debt and is still limping along), leaving the old "phone company" ILECs running the DSL show.
And the ILECs really didn't want to sell DSL in the first place. It was a low-profit service they had to offer as part of a deregulation deal, in order to be allowed back into the long-distance business. At the time long-distance was where the money was.
But then several competing long-haul fiber carriers finished their networks and started competing for the same customers - leading to a price war that sucked all the profit out of long distance, killed off many of the new upstarts (who didn't get the revenue to pay off their investors), and crashed the telecom equipment market. (This is the "telecom crash".) Meanwhile, el-cheapo carriers started selling compressed packet phone service, over either their own fat pipes or the internet, and the price tanked even worse.
So the ILECs aren't getting the long-distance profits that were supposed to pay for the DSL rollout. And once you've got your DSL line, maybe you'll use internet phone calls to cut your regional long-distance bill. And if they ever DO put in more copper they have to rent it to their competitors at a loss. Is it any wonder they're in no hurry to get you a DSL line?
2) Cable is a cute system when you only have a few customers. You can serve them cheaply from the head-end. But the bandwidth is shared. Add more customers, the quality of service for each drops. (And one customer who actually USES the bandwidth he bought can wreck it for everybody else on his branch.)
You can fix it, at least somewhat, by splitting up the big tree into a bunch of branches, running fiber to the cutpoints, and treating each branch as a separate tree for the digital service. (Like putting in more, smaller, cells in a cellphone network.) And you can deal with the "power users" by throttling the users (if you can get away with such consumer fraud), then moving the hogs to a different channel (with better QOS and a higher price). And you can sick the FBI onto the uncappers...
Fiber to the splitter and cable to the home is a nice compromise. (Like "fiber to the curb" and copper to the home for longer-range or higher speed DSL.) But it's a lot more expensive than the original almost-free-money service they had been counting on.
Meanwhile, they're MEDIA conglomerates. They're REALLY in this business to sell you network TV, cable premium channels, and pay-per-view, then turn around and sell your "eyeball time" to the advertisers. The LAST thing they want is for you to shift those eyeballs to a broadcast medium they DON'T control, which doesn't pay them as much as your current viewing habits, and which might be selling the very product they created without paying them their fees.
So they have little incentive to provide cheap broadband. They only have to do better than the ILEC's DSL operation to make SOME money. But why push hard on a service that may end up costing them more money than it generates - either in problem-solving buildouts or loss of revenue elsewhere in the empire?
3) Meanwhile, the content providers are in a panic. They have the idea that digital distribution means perfect cheap copies, and to them that means piracy. So they don't want their stuff available digitally AT ALL unless they have a stranglehold on it. Thus they're not interested in rolling out a digital distribution network of their own.
They're also parts of the media conglomerates, who get major bux from broadcast outlets. Broadcast media has THE highest return-on-investment of ANY industry. The LAST thing they want (as a media conglomerate) is competition from low-budget upstarts enabled by the new technology.
With the Napster case and DMCA and CARP and the like, they've put the spike in both pirate and legal internet content distribution that's outside their control. And they have no incentive to roll out their own operations.
So the content-distribution bandwidth demand didn't happen. The internet has degenerated into the equivalent of commercial catalogs, billboards, and bulk mail, and while nerds may still want it, joe-middle-america is NOT chomping at the bit for bandwidth and waving money at the first guy to provide it.
Without demand for the last mile you don't get the cycle of expansion of supply, economy of scale, competition, and price drops. And the last mile remains a bottleneck.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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
Back in May 2001, there was an article in the NY Times (copy) and Slashdot (also mentioned on DeadMedia.org) about a project to run fiber optics through pneumatic tubes in New York and other big cities. While the meme is out there, it's not clear that anybody's actually implemented it. One problem, besides the financial issues, and the World Trade Center collapse in the most interesting market area, is that real ownership of the tubes is vary unclear, at least in New York City.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Another issue is that much of the Oregon build-out happened late in the boom - if you look at the Boston-NewYork-WashingtonDC routes, which were developed earlier, you'll find that there's less multiplexing and more sale of individual whole fibers, because the equipment costs were higher, but they did a Moore's Law type crash dive during the late 90s and early 00s that Oregon benefitted more from.
Meanwhile, if you're trying to get a data feed to every lottery terminal in Oregon, you don't care about 160-wavelength x 10Gbps OC192 fibers - you care about getting 4kbps worth of data on whatever kind of copper wire or wireless goes out to the convenience store, and doing the protocol conversion because lottery terminals still speak X.25 and nobody wants to pay the capital costs to teach the things IP :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My dear I_redwolf,
you are confusing cost with marginal cost. Let me make up some numbers to be the idea across.
Assume it costs $1000 to dig the trench, $200 to light the fibre, and $20 to add an an additional fiber while the trench is open. You have a paying customerfor one fiber -- who you can provision fo $1000 + $200 + $20 = $1220 dollars. To avoid your concept of "waste", that's what you'd do: lay the single fiber for $1220.
Great, now, comes the next customer. Except that you've already buried the trench, so you have dig everything up again. That's another $1220.
Now consider a "wasteful" competitor. While the trench was open, they laid 10 fibers, so that spent $1000 + $200 + 10 * $20 = $1,400 dollars provisioning the first customer. But now, each additional customer only costs $200. By the second customer, the "wasteful" competitor has only stpen $1,600 and is clobbering the "non-wasteful" who has spent $2,440.
This is bascically what happened: while the trenches were open, companies laid all the fiber that would fit, but did't light it. The potential "waste" of this approach was slight next to the waste of digging up the streets again in a couple of years.
hope that helps.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
What don't you understand about there being no customers on that fiber? Not one hundred, not ten, ZERO. It nets ZERO profit.. there is no INCOME from it. Lets use some numbers to get the idea across.
I spend $1000 to dig the trench, and $20 to add an additional fiber while the trench is open. There is no cost to "light the fibre" because it isn't being used. So thats $1020.. I have zero customers and the fibre isn't lit. I have gained nothing. WASTE.
I'm not confusing anything, you're confused; a 5 yr old could grasp this idea. If you buy a car and sit it in your driveway, don't put any gas into it, don't use it. It's just sitting there, it's a waste.
Ahhh, I see the problem.
You assume that you know how many customers you will have before you build. Only monopolies have that luxury. Yeah, once it's built, you discover you don't have enough customers. But you never actually know how many customers you have until you have already built that darn thing -- and then it's too late to add more strands.
Look back to my original post: with 95% over-capacity, even if each builder had only put in a tenth as much fiber, we'd be in the identical place: (almost) the same money spent, the same prices, the same bankruptcies. Once you decide to build one of these things, you're a fool not to put in "too much" capacity.
Using our toy example, let's assume customers are willing pay to $1500/strand, but you don't know how many customers there are. Now, to keep this simple, let's examine the case of 0 customers and 3 customers. Then, in our highly contrived example, we get four possible outcomes:
"non wasteful" (single fibre) build: cost: $1020
no customers, $1020 loss
or, three customers, $l500 - $1020 - $200 - = $280 profit. remember, you only put one strand down.
"wasteful" (10 fibre) build: cost: $1200
no customers, $1200 loss
three cusomers: $4500 - $1200 - $600 = $2700
And your next 7 customers, if you can find them, are pure gravy.
Notice that the "waste" when no customers turn up in the "wasteful" and "non-wasteful" builds only differ by 20%, but in the three customer case the "wasteful" build makes almost ten times as much money.
Once again, as outlined in my first post, once you decide to build one of these things, the rational thing to do is lay more fibre than you currently need. If you don't think you have any customers, don't build. If you think you have *any* customers, build big. There is no middle ground here. Yes, that extra $20 for the next unused fibre is a "waste" at this moment in time, but if you don't spend the $20 bucks now, you'll never get another customer.
Let me turn this around: do you consider your car insurance premium "wasted" if you don't get into a wreck? because the idential logic applies there as well. The future is uncertain, you make changes at the margin (additional fibre in the trench, paying your insurance premiums) that have the greatest potential to influence the future (serving extra customers cheaply if they appear, not being rendered carless by a wreck). The future turning unexpectedly does not mean, perforce, that the original marginal expense was "wasted."
Your car analogy is deeply flawed: the marginal (additional) cost for a second car is about the same as the first one. If additional cars cost 1/20th as much as the first one, I suspect most americans would have extra cars sitting all over the place.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
Actually the problem is that I think we differ on what the word "waste" means. See, you're operating under the notion that this fiber; someday down the line will get usage. That is not the case even for the foreseeable future which is a good 15-20 yrs. Now investment wise I see this as a waste, I also see it as waste period.
I don't consider a car insurance premium "wasted" because I receive the value of knowing I'm covered should I get into an accident. The logic doesn't apply; as you said the future is uncertain, the fiber isn't being used and probably will never be used. So what you have is byproduct, waste or whatever you want to call it. If you don't see this as a waste then it's because somehow you think someone will receive return on this. Meaning that because they dumped all the fibre they could into the ground someday, someone will use it; yippee you saved money because you don't have to dig it up again. Of course no one is gonna use it for the forseeable future if at all. Did you really save money? Or is it a waste.. be honest now.
The logic doesn't apply; as you said the future is uncertain, the fiber isn't being used and probably will never be used.
What makes you so certain? Let's do a quick back of the envelope. A reasonable estimated is that 'net traffic doubles every 2 years. I can find references that say "9 months" and "100 days," I really feel 2 years is closer to the mark. Please feel free to correct this number. Our source article claimed "95% unused. So we need demand to go up by a factor of twenty. 2^5 = 32, so we get there with 5 x2 years == a decade. One decade. Similar nfrastructure projects like sewers and powerlines are planned across multipe decades, so I don't buy you "not used for the foreseeable future" claim.
But even it I did, I stand by my claim that laying additional fibre in the trench was not wasteful investment at the the time of construction.
You're final sentence (Did you really save money) betrays you: it's not about saving money, it about making a reasoable gamble on the future. If you were focused on avoiding loss, you weren't in this business in the first place. Given that you've already rented the backhoes, it's totally reasonable toss a little extra cable in the trench. If you didn't believe a market existed, than you would never have rented the backhoe. The "waste," as I understand your position, was not the extra fiber but digging the trench in the first place.
Hindsight is 20/20: obviously the less wasteful way to this was to sit on you money and buy one of these networks out of bankruptcy. But few of us have such proficient crystal balls.
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs