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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."
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
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
They had so much fiber, their whole company went down the toilet.
Wrong. This is proof of not being able to afford to light up the fiber. There's a reason why all of it was put in the ground in the 90's. That's because people were pouring money into it without thinking. That gave the companies the money to lay it. Now, the economy is flat, and companies are barely making money on broadband as it is. This isn't some ploy to personally screw you over.
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
Have you ever worked at a big company? I've worked at a few, and my personal experience is that in really large companies (say, more than 1000 employees) this very particular organizational rot sets in ... When the people making the decisions are so removed from their customers, they just stop caring. And if there is no competition to make them care, they'll just get fat and sleepy, and their customers will fall behind.
Residential DSL is the perfect example. Here in NYC, Verizon owns the phone lines, so all residential DSL has to go through them. In theory, they're supposed to allow equal access to all res-DSL companies, whether they're Verizon residential DSL or their own competition.
But I know dozens of people here who have DSL -- and nobody I knew was able to get DSL from a company other than Verizon. More than one person told me they tried to go with a smaller company, but the installation experience was really difficult: The other company couldn't do anything 'til Verizon flipped that switch, and somehow non-Verizon customers seem to get lower priority than Verizon customers. Curious, that.
A company doesn't have to be evil to screw you. Often, complacency is enough.
Do domain names matter?
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.
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
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!
Not half as stupid as your complete lack of information on this subject.
The key point you seem to not understand is that "Lack of bandwidth" no longer drives this market. There's more than enough bandwidth to go around with the leftover from the dot-com boom. Did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason they're not lighting up the fiber is that it's simply not needed right now?
Lighting up Fiber doesn't make bandwidth cheaper in this market since there's no demand. In reality, excess fiber would make bandwidth more expensive due to the increased overhead of having to maintain equipment and staff that aren't doing anything. Also remember, there's more to bringing bandwidth to the home or business than having fiber within a mile of the door.. The cost to trench it in and install the equipment, even if you're tapping from a short distance, is substantial -- well beyond the reach of any consumer or small business.
Furthermore, your arguments regarding anti-competitive behavior are even more ridiculous. If there's one industry where being a monopoly is a massive disadvantage, it's telecom. The Bells get screwed DAILY by the tariffs in place by the FCC (I don't have sympathy for them, they dug themselves into that mess) but business is NOT easy for them. The small-guy is at every advantage in this industry. If the big boys own the lines and the little guys want to use them, the FCC says they have to let them -- even if it means the big-boys taking a financial loss on the deal.
Sorry.. but you have much to learn about the telecom world before you open your mouth on the subject again.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
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.
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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I worked at Bell Labs for a few years. After that experience, it doesn't puzzle me how telcos can have a monopoly, more
captive customers than they can handle, and still "loose money". It's not lost, it's looted. In front of the building (in Holmdel NJ),
a limo would sit for a half hour or more waiting for the Pres. of the Labs to arrive by helicopter. The copter would land, the limo
would drive him 3000 feet to the door, then take off. Amazing.
The primary concern for management was getting the latest org chart to see their progress up the pyramid. I was a bottom feeder/
consultant and I think there was at least 25 levels of management between me and limo boy. No wonder Lucent is in the shape it's
in. An army of talent, led by a crush of PHB's all trying to move up the food chain.
It was a constant cycle of projects started, brought almost to the point of completion and then boom. A new manager, a departmental
re-org, and all of the work tossed in the dumpster, deleted of of the machines because they were allocated to another department, or
just left to rot. Everyone had stories about how cool this or that project was and then got cancelled. Very few stories of successful,
shipping products. Look at what happened to Unix! They couldn't even figure out what to do with it. Tossed around until it was finally
sold off so they could make the numbers for the quarter.
One bright spot, they did have pretty good coffee.
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*
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
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
companies are barely making money on broadband as it is.
If they'd charge based on usage and eliminate all the restrictions on home/business usage (no servers, etc) they might be able to make some money.
The story isn't complete.
Much of the fiber that was laid along the I-5 corridor was expected to stay dark for a long time. It doesn't cost that much more to lay excess capacity, once you've committed to buying the rights of way and doing the trenching. The story is weak for suggesting that the dotcom crash caused all the dark fiber-- it didn't. Depending on which segment you chose to look at, anywhere from 50% to 75% or more of the fiber would still be dark even if the dotcoms and the economy had continued to boom along.
The story is also weak for implying that this extra capacity is wasted. That isn't so; it will be there when the need develops. My town has twice reviewed the costs and bennies of lighting up some of that fiber to attract new businesses. So far other problems in the economy have ruled against it, but sooner or later a number of towns in southern Oregon and northern California will do this.
Another weakness in the story is its implication that the dark fiber has cost a lot of jobs in Oregon. There has been much moaning and gnashing of teeth around here because all those cable laying jobs have gone away, but that didn't happen because of dark cable. That happened because, gee, once the cable's in place I guess we don't need any of these ditch-diggers any more, huh?
I think the story is right on the money that too many companies were chasing this business opportunity.
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 agree. my dad was the project manager for king county's municipal fiber optic system. he went into great detail about planning for the future. did you know that putting fiber through downtown seattle is an absolute bitch? you have to figure out where you can run fiber, and how to get it across major highways in downtown. this involves permits, buyouts of pipelines, co-leases and whatnot. you expect 400% increase in bandwidth annually for twenty years, and as a result, put ALOT of fiber in the ground. when the demand increases, you light up a new strand of fiber. it only costs about 10% more overall to pull 40 (or 200, or however many you need) strands of fiber instead of the 2 you actually need at the time, once you factor in the cost of engineering how the hell you're going to put it there in the first place.
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