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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.
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.