Dark fibre

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Fiber crew installing a 432-count dark fibre cable underneath the streets of Midtown Manhattan, New York City

A dark fibre or unlit fibre is an unused optical fibre, available for use in fibre-optic

communication. Dark fibre originally referred to the potential network capacity of
telecommunication infrastructure. Dark fibre may be leased from a network service
provider. Because the marginal cost of installing additional fibre optic cables is very low
once a trench has been dug or conduit laid, a great excess of fibre was installed in the
US during the telecom boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. This excess capacity
was later referred to as dark fibre following the dot-com crash of the early 2000s that
briefly reduced demand for high-speed data transmission. These unused fibre optic
cables later created a new market for unique private services that could not be
accommodated on lit fibre cables (i.e., cables used in traditional long-distance
communication).

Contents

 1Motivations
 2Market
 3Networks
 4Variations
 5See also
 6References

Motivations[edit]
Much of the cost of installing cables is in the civil engineering work required. This
includes planning and routing, obtaining permissions, creating ducts and channels for
the cables, and finally installation and connection. This work usually accounts for most
of the cost of developing fibre networks. For example, in Amsterdam's citywide
installation of a fibre network, roughly 80% of the costs involved were labour, with only
10% being fibre.[1] It therefore makes sense to plan for, and install, significantly more
fibre than is needed for current demand, to provide for future expansion and provide for
network redundancy in case any of the cables fail. Many fibre-optic cable owners such
as railroads and power utilities have always included additional fibres with the intention
to lease these to other carriers.
During the dot-com bubble, a large number of telephone companies built optical-fibre
networks, each with the business plan of cornering the market in telecommunications by
providing a network with sufficient capacity to take all existing and forecast traffic for the
entire region served. This was based on the assumption that telecoms traffic,
particularly data traffic, would continue to grow exponentially for the foreseeable future.
[2]
 The advent of wavelength-division multiplexing reduced the demand for fibre by
increasing the capacity of a single fibre by a factor of as much as 100. According to
Gerry Butters, the former head of Lucent's Optical Networking Group at Bell Labs, the
amount of data that could be carried by an optical fibre was doubling every nine months
at the time.[3][4][5][6] This progress in the ability to carry data over fibre reduced the need for
more fibres. As a result, the wholesale price for data communications collapsed and a
number of these companies filed for bankruptcy protection as a result. Global
Crossing[7] and Worldcom[8] are two high-profile examples in the United States.
Similar to the Railway Mania, the misfortune of one market sector became the good
fortune of another, and this overcapacity created a new telecommunications sector. [citation
needed]

Market[edit]
For many years incumbent local exchange carriers would not sell dark fibre to end
users, because they believed selling access to this core asset would cannibalize their
other, more lucrative services. Incumbent carriers in the United States were required to
sell dark fibre to competitive local exchange carriers as unbundled network
elements (UNE), but they have successfully lobbied to reduce these provisions for
existing fibre, and eliminated it completely for new fibre placed for fibre to the
premises (FTTP) deployments.[9]
Fibre swaps between competitive carriers are quite common. This increases the reach
of their networks in places where their competitor has a presence, in exchange for the
provision of fibre capacity in places where that competitor has no presence. This is a
practice known in the industry as "coopetition".
Meanwhile, other companies arose specializing as dark fibre providers. Dark fibre
became more available when there was enormous overcapacity after the telecoms
boom years of the late 1990s through 2001. The market for dark fibre tightened up with
the return of capital investment to light up existing fibre, and with mergers and
acquisitions resulting in a consolidation of dark fibre providers.

Networks[edit]
Dark fibre can be used to create a privately operated optical fibre network that is run
directly by its operator over dark fibre leased or purchased from another supplier. This is
opposed to purchasing bandwidth or leased line capacity on an existing network. Dark
fibre networks may be used for private networking, or as Internet access or Internet
infrastructure networking.
Dark fibre networks may be point-to-point, or use star, self-healing ring,
or mesh topologies.
Because both ends of the link are controlled by the same organization, dark fibre
networks can operate using the latest optical protocols using wavelength division
multiplexing to add capacity where needed, and to provide an upgrade path between
technologies. Many dark fibre metropolitan area networks use cheap Gigabit
Ethernet equipment over CWDM, rather than expensive SONET ring systems.
They offer very high price-performance for network users who require high
performance, such as Google, which has dark network capacities for video and search
data,[10] or wish to operate their own network for security or other commercial reasons.
However, dark fibre networks are generally only available in high-population-density
areas where fibre has already been laid, as the civil engineering costs of installing fibre
to new locations is often prohibitive. For these reasons, dark fibre networks are typically
run between data centres and other places with existing fibre infrastructure.

Variations[edit]
Managed dark fibre is a form of wavelength-division multiplexed access to otherwise
dark fibre where a pilot signal is beamed into the fibre by the fibre provider for
management purposes using a transponder tuned to an assigned wavelength.
Virtual dark fibre using wavelength multiplexing allows a service provider to offer
individual wavelengths. Other wavelengths on the same fibre are leased to other
customers or used for other purposes. This is typically done using coarse wavelength
division multiplexing CWDM because the wider 20 nm spacing of the wavebands makes
these systems much less susceptible to interference.