I remember back 10 years ago, seeing enormous amounts of fiberoptic cables being laid along highways in my area (RT 93, 495, etc.). It seemed to go on for years.
Then came the dot-com meltdown, and firms heavily invested in FO lines dies (Enron, Global Crossing, etc.).
I recall seeing articles that claimed that there was enormous line capacity that was not being utilized-is this really the case?
Of course, now we have fiber to the home (“FIOS”), so (presmably) a lot of capacity is being used.
If this is true, why are communications satellites still being launched?
There used to be a lot of “dark fiber” that wasn’t being immediately used. The dot-com boom led to a lot of companies trying to cash in by doing the infrastructure work and cashing in later.
There’s no longer such a severe overcapacity. The problem then was that capacity was growing faster than demand. But since then, demand has caught up and the crash slowed down network expansion growth. So, things have kind of evened out.
I believe Google, in the last decade, has been trying to get into the fiber infrastructure game, at least partly to encourage traditional ISPs to do more on the infrastructure side.
As for comms satellites, they’re just another option. They provide a reasonable way of providing network capacity across oceans and to remote locations or for temporary access. If you happen to live 20 miles from the nearest house, it really doesn’t make sense for anybody to pay to lay a fiber optic line just for one house. Just getting electricity out to remote places is probably a hassle. More fiber tends to mean more fiber where it is needed (higher population densities). It makes more economic sense to upgrade capacity in a city.
Good question. I live in what some refer to as ‘‘fly over country’’, and others, ‘‘God’s country’’. I saw the same thing. I even stopped and wrote down the numbers off the orange pipe, then did a search discovering it was fiber duct. It seemed they ran 3 one inch ducts up and down every highway. I saw little activity in town. Later I saw them pulling fiber. Running the duct is the expensive part. Once done, they can easily string fiber later when needed.
I forget when it was, I may have even still been on dial up. It certainly was before Facebook, Utube, etc. If you build it, they will come.
Unfortunately the fiber optic doesn’t mean the rural customers get any benefit regardless of capacity to city folks even when it runs past their house. Rural often means slow dial up.
In the late 1990’s, my drive time entertainment was watching the progress of a fiber project along US99 in Seattle.
I think it was Global Crossing who drilled what looked like an 18 inch bore, filled it with 2 or 3 inch, color coded plastic pipes (like a color coded wiring harness) and then pulled ONE fiber optic bundle through it.
Not a lot of ‘dark fiber’, but lots of space to pull additional ones without much effort.