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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.
Google long ago bought up much of this fiber and has been sitting on it. Patiently waiting for ATT,Comcast, Verizon to all back themselves into a corner.
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
Here in Charlotte, there are crews all over trenching in new fiber conduit - both for Google and for AT&T. I found it interesting that the AT&T crews that I've seen are putting in a single 1-inch conduit, whereas the Google crews are putting in multiple (sometimes as many as five) 2-inch conduits. Maybe Google is just trying to catch up. Or maybe they have bigger plans.
We got enough railroads. What don't have is new boxcars to replace old boxcars at the end of their 50-year lifecycle.
The number of boxcars in service in North America fell by 41% in the past decade to just under 125,000 last year as 101,600 cars were scrapped and only about 13,800 replacement were added. That downsizing accelerated a decades long shift by railroads to more specialized railcars and intermodal carriers that allow shipping containers to hop from trucks to trains.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/shortage-of-railroad-boxcars-has-shippers-fuming-2015-06-21
Most people don't know that many cities throughout the United States are already wired with "dark fiber"...
except those who have been a part of Slashdot because it's been talked about before, more than once. E.G. (ca. 2005) http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
If they actually start lighting it up in more places, however, that would indeed be good news.
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!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
People proposing more Passenger Rail in the US, don't understand a few things, and typically are comparing the US to some small European country (like Denmark).
First, the USA is quite large, compared to Europe. See: http://i.imgur.com/GML5Ei0.png
This creates huge problems for people who think France is big. Who in Europe would take a train from Madrid to Tel Aviv ? Yet these same people would be happy to tell us that we should build a rail line from LA to Atlanta. Or Seattle to New York. Or San Francisco to DC.
My first point is that people from Europe (I have French relatives) who don't have a clue how big the US actually is.
Second, we already have High Speed Rail here, they are called Airplanes. For most case scenarios, Air travel works much better than HSR does. It is less expensive, faster and more convenient than HSR. But they aren't as romantic as "trains" for some reason.
I am intrigued by the notion of a hyperloop for intermediate distance travel. Espeicially if it could incorporate travel from city centers (downtown) to suburban neighborhoods. On demand travel of intermediate distances would be a huge benefit to most cities.
I am not opposed to building out mass transit systems, but they have to make sense beyond some romantic notion or socialist utopia viewpoint.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
Where I live, there are two last-mile networks: cable and phone. Most of the phone copper is owned by a single company, but that's not a problem because other parties can lease the capacity. The government enforces that they offer the lease, and that they charge a reasonable price. As a result, there are a dozen different providers that I can choose from, and there's a healthy competition between cable and phone to claim the highest bandwidth.
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.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
My point is this: Instead of taking a US map and superimposing it on Europe, take a map of France, and superimpose it anywhere on the US. Then compare the French railroad network to the US network at that location, and see how many US travellers take a comparable train trip to Paris-Lyon.
Our major population centers are further apart than Europe's.
In the US, LA to NYC is 2700 miles. Even a Chicago-NYC line would be about 800 miles.
You're defining major population centers as only the very top cities by population? If you want to do that you'd find Europe is also quite spread out. The top 3 cities in Europe by population are Istanbul, Moscow, and London. They are quite far apart. Istanbul to Moscow is like 1500 miles. Istanbul to London is 1800 miles. I don't think there's high speed rail between those cities.
But really there are hundreds of population centers of interest that could be connected in the US and many of them are much closer than that. Forget Chicago to NYC, how about Chicago to Minneapolis or something. And it doesn't even have to be population centers, it could simply be popular attractions. I live in Raleigh, NC and I think high speed rail to the beach would be great, combined with a bus service that went up and down the coast to major beaches, hotels, shopping areas, etc. If I could get to the beach in 1 hour instead of 3 hours driving, I'd go a lot more often, even in the off season. It's quite nice to walk along the beach in fall and winter, but not nice enough to justify 6 hours round trip driving more than once every few years.
Oh and getting rid of the terrible, awful menace of trying to find a parking spot at the beach? Priceless.