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http://www.toughguy.co.uk

Thanks for the post!

Yes, the dark fibre phenomenon is quite odd, and seems to contradict the common perception that we are eternally short of bandwidth.

Just to recap on the article, the dark fibre situation was born as a consequence of the wildly exuberant and virtually reckless financial investment pumped into the dot.coms (before the bursting of the bubble) in the late nineties.  Desperate to reap huge profits, telecoms providers spent vast quantities of money on laying endless runs of cable, with the hope of cashing in on the burgeoning requirement for greater and greater bandwidth.

Two things happened that ruined the party...and the profits.  Firstly, the dot.com bubble imploded onto the wreckage of its paper-thin speculation.  When the market turned tough (the NASDAQ collapsed and the US Fed Reserve had been making consistent interest rate increases), the dot.coms had nothing left to prop them up, and with no dot.coms, the fibre that had been laid was suddenly redundant for the foreseeable future.

The other big "problem" was that new technology resulted in vastly increased efficiency in data transfer over the fibre.  Henceforth, a fraction of the fibre originally required to carry data was now needed, resulting in a compounded stock of dark fibre, and some very stressed providers with a glut of expensive fibre on their hands - and no one to lease it to.

To answer your question, the dark fibre still exists, but there are signs that it is increasingly being made use of.

You probably won't be surprised to hear that Google appear to be leading the charge to grab the dark cabling, although these news sources are quite old now:

http://www.news.com/Google-wants-dark-fiber/2100-1034_3-5537392.html

There is also some evidence to suggest that a certain amount of the fibre went to educational institutions at a bargain price:

http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i27/27a02901.htm

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else knows of developments in the use of the dark fibre.

Whilst it may seem that with ever-increasing bandwidth requirements (YouTube, MP3 downloads, huge media files, etc etc) the dark fibre will be quickly brought back into play, I'd be cautious with speculating as such.  The leap in technology mentioned above (i.e. the increased efficiency in data transmission) highlights how the dynamics of these situations don't always pan out as we may expect.

Cheers,

Mark.

Mark Lee.