Today we're here to talk about the mystery of 'dark fiber.'Dark fiber, what is it? Well, it's a telecom term you used to hear a lot about.You haven't heard much about it lately and you're going to hear more about itlater. Dark fiber is a couple of things: excess fiber optic capacity that waslaid down in the ground during the boom of the telecom era and has never beenused. It can also refer to a product, which is fiber that you buy from acarrier, but doesn't have any electronics or photonics associated with it. Youhave to supply all the equipment yourself. You're just actually buying theglass thread that's underground.
So why would you build it? Well, there are 3 reasons. I callthem the smart, the stupid and the really smart reason. The smart reason: it'scheaper to build once than to build twice. In other words, if you're puttingfiber optic cable from San Francisco all the way to Chicago, you don't want todo that every year. What you want to do is pull cable, install it, put it inthe ground, get the right aways once, put as much as you're going to need forthe next 5 years because it's cheaper to do that than to go back andrenegotiate that or to reinstall it every year or every other year. So it's asmart reason. The stupid reason, people overestimated the demand for fiber andfor telecom capacity in general. They kept seeing these explosions and networkaccess and they said, "You know what? This of course is going to go up andup and up forever." Well, it is going up, but it's going up like this.It's not going up like this. So lots of telecom companies went broke installingfiber that never got used. So smart reason, stupid reason.
What's the really smart reason? Well, you know what? There'sgoing to be a product there someday. At some point someone is going to say, youknow what, I just need the glass, the fiber optic cable between these twolocations, but I want to put my equipment at both ends. I want to, you knowwhat, I want to send movies and I want to send them over a private fiber opticnetwork. I want to send MP3 files and build a private network and I want myhardware to build signs of that. At some point, fiber optic is going to besomething that people are going to buy, not just telecom carriers, but largeorganizations, entertainment companies. It might be the really smart reason tohave dark fiber.
