Dark fiber

[dougo]

Via Y Combinator's Startup Library, I read an editorial from February, 2005 with the following passage:

The coming tech revolution comes down primarily to bandwidth -- leveraging the dark fiber that was stuffed underground in huge quantities five years ago to support communication services that weren't economically feasible at that time but we were all so stoked we didn't care. The companies that built those networks have departed for the most part but the fiber remains. And with the capital cost of that fiber having been absorbed through bankruptcies, the advent of new technologies for pumping even more photons down the line, and the inexorable force of Moore's Law, many of the things we thought we'd be doing in 1999 we'll actually be doing by late 2005.

This whole business of dark fiber has been bugging me for a lot longer than five years. I seem to remember people were talking about fiber to the home back in 1994, but maybe I'm imagining that. Anyway, we've been stuck at the cablemodem plateau of about 4 Mbps for $40/mo since the mid-90s. It's aggravating that Moore's Law hasn't applied to bandwidth, and I can really feel it. It doesn't make sense that it wasn't "economically feasible"—I have to think the wealth created by the new kinds of things you could do with an order of magnitude increase in consumer bandwidth would more than make up for the one-time costs. Probably that's naive, and there's lots of complicated reasons why this hasn't happened yet, but my gut tells me there was either some conspiracy to suppress consumer fiber-optic or else everyone was too short-sighted to see the profits they were missing.

Anyway, apparently Verizon is finally starting to sort of roll it out: FiOS goes up to 30Mbps downstream and 5Mbps upstream, but that's $179.95/mo. And no, it's not available in my neighborhood anyway.

Comments

[katespace.livejournal.com]

We have RCN's 10Mbps service, it's $49/month (I think) for new customers.

[mrmorse.livejournal.com]

One of the issues is that it's much cheaper to provide massive bandwidth at the backbone level than to the last mile (actually to customers' houses). So, once you get out to the information superhighway, there's tons of bandwidth, which is what led to dark fiber. The problem is all the local traffic trying to get from your house to the highway.

[mshonle.livejournal.com]

My theory is that this has to do with storage more than you'd think. In the late 90s we couldn't download an entire season of Lost even if we had the bandwidth to: we'd have no place to put it.

There are also network effects at play: no one is setting up video conferencing on their machine because others aren't either. The network effect is preventing this killer app from really getting play (although it's overrated anyway).

The marginal utility of better bandwidth--if it just means downloading pages in 0.0012 seconds instead of 0.005--is small.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I'm much more concerned about upstream bandwidth than downstream. I want to publish content (not even videos or mp3s, just photos) and not have to worry about it being slower than a 56k modem if more than one or two people visit at once.

[chrismwage.livejournal.com]

Also, frequently overlooked in the coverage of all the "dark fiber" out there is that lighting fiber is a lot more expensive than laying it..