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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.
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
I can't find it by googling (amusing that) but I heard that Google over a decade ago snapped up a bunch of dark fiber after the .com bust. I had wondered what they were intending to do with that...
Here's hoping they light that shit up like a christmas tree :)
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There was a big fire-sale going on since 2001
In some cases Level3 (while they still could) made extended bond offerings so that they could pick up companies like Broadwing, in other case companies like Cogent bought up failed fiber providers.
For the most part Level3 sought companies that had technology similar to their own (e.g.the head of Broadwing used to work for Level3) while Cogent bought whatever they could get cheapest and kept ti cobbled together to force prices down and (they hoped) to strangle Level3 out of business before they could get back on an even footing.
My bet is that Google has a sweet leasing deal with Level3
Once again, we see the government stepping in to solve a problem private industry wouldn't touch.
The problem you describe, is caused by government in the first place. In this case, municipalities offering up "Franchise" agreements to ONE company for Cable (not Fiber) and excluding all others.
Yes, this is typical "Government" causing a problem that only it can solve by itself. And not really solving ANY problems in the long run, but actually causing MORE problems than needed.
IF the Municipalities instead built a single COLO facility and brought fiber to every residence or business (or at least Conduit), we could have private enterprise competing for customers, without needing a franchise agreement. BUT nobody thinks along those lines, and thus, we have government solving problems, that create more problems, that only government can solve!
And in the end, you have bureaucrats and politicians taking over more and more control of our lives, while people like yourself blame businesses for doing exactly what governments are telling them what they can and cannot do!
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Blah blah blah. Even China and Russia build high speed rail - China is about as large as USA and Russia is twice the size. High speed rail would work just fine for routes like New York to Boston or, say, LA to Las Vegas. Or Miami to New Orleans.
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