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MillimeterDark fiber ready-made to carry video content?
Apr 26, 2006 8:00 AM
A ready-made, low-cost, high-capacity national network: It could be just the thing to drive ever-wider distribution of high-quality video. And many potential users of this video content believe just such a network is already in place, in the thousands of miles of dark fiber criss-crossing North America and the rest of the world.
Throughout the 1990s, a long roster of major companies dug trenches and buried fiber lines in anticipation of burgeoning demand. Rapidly overbuilt, this vast fiber network fell into disuse after the great shake-out of the 1990s. No one is quite sure just how much of the resulting dark fiber exists today, but as recently as last year industry experts believed as much as 70 percent of all the fiber in place in the United States was not being used.
TeleGeography Research of Washington, DC, estimates little more than 14 percent of the potential capacity on major submarine cables will be lit by the end of 2006. The company sees a revival in demand for bandwidth and comments, “Lit bandwidth supply and bandwidth demand are coming into balance.”
However, even meeting bandwidth demand with lit fiber leaves plenty unlit. According to TeleGeography Research, “Most of the potential capacity in fiber networks remains untapped.”
Today, an increasingly diverse group of users are beginning to light up this fiber to meet all sorts of needs.
From universities looking for a cheap home-grown network to major corporations seeking independence from their ISPs, more and more users are eyeing dark fiber as a key resource in meeting their needs for video and other bandwidth-intensive communications.
The big lure today, of course, is the so-called triple play. Telcos, cable carriers, and other players are competing to offer voice, data, and multimedia content through a single connection to home or office. Delivering that content—especially hundreds of channels of high-definition video—demands a huge amount of network capacity.
An existing network that could meet this demand is naturally not going to go un-exploited for long.
Rumors have been rampant for months now, for instance, that Google is acquiring rights to orphaned fiber-optic cables all over the country, with an eye to launching a free nationwide broadband network. Owning its own network would drive Google’s distribution costs down, and Google users would have a cheap new alternative to their ISPs.
Global Crossing recently acknowledged that nontraditional players like Google are among those driving an increase in sales of indefeasible rights of use, or IRUs, to its own large inventory of dark fiber.
Other organizations with significant bandwidth needs are also finding it more economical to assemble their own networks than to buy services from their phone company or ISP. Often, these national networks can be assembled relying on existing unused fiber. Steady price declines for the equipment needed to light up this fiber are also making this option more attractive.
Today, the business world abounds in companies whose business model involves linking would-be users to appropriate inventories of unused fiber. The proposition for users is powerful: Rights of way have been acquired, excavation done, and fiber lines pulled through miles upon miles of conduit. All that must be added are the lasers and related equipment to drive data through these nets.
In addition to coming down in price, this apparatus has also gained capability. Multiplexing equipment, which allows each strand of fiber to carry more than one signal, is now in its fourth generation. Other technologies can divide a single fiber into fewer channels for runs of shorter distances, but at dramatically lower costs—making dark fiber an attractive choice for such perennially budget-challenged users as universities and health-care networks.
For the growing community of users who need to send high-quality video content over networks, careful implementation of a strategy using dark fiber might deliver just the right combination of economy and capability.
