[ary]

The last line stood out to me.

> ... passing by along the way the idle fiber infrastructure that the FCC set aside nearly a decade ago.

Can anyone elaborate on what exactly they mean? Is this dark fiber sitting around somewhere? Did the FCC sanction the deployment and private companies built it out (and then ignored it) or was government money spent to lay the wires?

[yummyfajitas]

There is tons of dark fiber, due to the economics of laying cables.

Digging a ditch is expensive. The fiber you put in the ditch is cheap. So if you are already digging a ditch, you load it up with 100x as much fiber as you imagine yourself ever needing in the future.

This is vastly cheaper than digging a second ditch 5-10 years down the line.

[mbreese]

Yeah, but aren't we talking about the "last mile" problem, not about dark fiber? I thought that most of the dark fiber was in long inter-city/state runs, not running down my neighborhood street.

I thought he was referring to dormant fiber that the telco owns that used to be available to third-parties at wholesale rates.

[ary]

That's exactly what I was talking about.

[Xlythe]

In exchange for less regulations, the FCC had private companies build out fiber networks in the 1990's. Most of it was never used, though, as companies instead focused on increasing bandwidth in copper wiring.

[qeorge]

Actually, yes. Tons of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre

[sliverstorm]

I'm not sure what they mean by "set aside", but back in the 90's there was a huge buildout of fiber as part of the dot-com bubble.

It's refereed to today as "dark fiber"; fiber optics that are not active.

However, I don't know that using that dark fiber would improve our internet. The backbones are already extremely fast; it's the downlinks and uplinks that are slow, and I'd guess most dark fiber is not routed to homes.