Google Is Lighting Up Dark Fiber All Over the Country (vice.com)

sarahnaomi writes: For years, San Francisco has had a robust fiber optic infrastructure laying dormant underneath its streets. Google announced Wednesday that it's going to start lighting some of those cables up. Welcome to the future of broadband in major cities. Most people don't know that many cities throughout the United States are already wired with "dark fiber": infrastructure that, for a variety of reasons, is never used to provide gigabit connections to actual residents. This fiber is often laid by companies you rarely hear about, like Zayo and Level 3, which lay fiber infrastructure in hopes the city, a provider like Google, or a corporate customer (like an office building) will eventually make use of it.

Comments

Re:Google also putting down lots of new fiber

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I'm sick of my ISDN line at home. Fifteen years ago when I lived in Rock Hill, SC, just south of Charlotte, NC mentioned by the GP, I had a connection over a hundred times faster than I now have in Seattle, WA. This is supposed to be a tech city, but everyone I know outside of work hates the Internet and wants to limit access to it. The city is very anti-Internet. They won't allow CenturyLink to upgrade to fiber in my area, and they won't allow Comcast, despite their government-granted monopoly for the area, to dig up the street to bury cable.

I apologize in advance but I don't get many opportunities to do this... but...

I have Time Warner, bitch!! Envy me!! AHAHAHAHA!

Okay, sorry about that. It's one of those bucket-list things I never thought I'd ever get to check off.