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

Posted by timothy on from the enlightenment-circa-2016 dept.

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.

6 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Former Level3 employee here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, Level3 laid a lot of extra fiber (and conduits) throughout major metro areas.

    The fiber itself was not very expensive (they use horizontal boring tools that have become the standard for under-street improvements), the real cost is in the gear needed to light and amplify signals on the fiber. My most recent former employer set up a 10GbS link between primary and colo sites for minimal cost by leveraging the Level3 fiber.

    If a well-funded organization like Google (Level3 has been cash constrained since the telecom crash) can lease and light these fibers it will be (yet) another major disruption to the metro network players, and frankly, it is about damned time

    1. Re:Former Level3 employee here by elistan · · Score: 3, Informative

      My city has recently begun rolling out 1gbps fiber to all residents. The city has a 10gbps pipe to the outside world. My ONT's IP address is a L3 address, so I assume the city is using fiber and perhaps even equipment belonging to L3. I think a lot of the fiber being used is from the '90s. (Except the new runs to everybody's house, of course.)

    2. Re:Former Level3 employee here by Trepidity · · Score: 3, Informative

      Not sure if it's the story you were thinking of, but there was a little bit of discussion in the tech press/blogs in 2005 in response to someone noticing that Google had put out a job posting for a "strategic negotiator" with experience in "identification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network". That led to a lot of speculation over what precisely Google was planning to do.

      --
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  2. Attributing it to private industry... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Those companies didn't "lay the fiber" of their own accord. Many municipalities have dig-once laws which require conduit and fiber to be laid during any excavation along a public right-of-way.

    Once again, we see the government stepping in to solve a problem private industry wouldn't touch.

  3. Google isnt the only one by darkain · · Score: 3, Informative

    Google isn't the only company doing this. CenturyLink just lit up old dark fiber in my neighborhood. I just got my gigabit install setup last night with them. It is really sweet to finally see some serious competition in the fiber to the home space after almost two decades of failed promises.

  4. Re:Railroads by slashping · · Score: 2, Informative

    This creates huge problems for people who think France is big. Who in Europe would take a train from Madrid to Tel Aviv ?

    Nobody. But plenty of people take the train from Paris to Lyon, or from Brussels to Antwerp.