Huge Demand for Dark Fiber Networks Industry

A dark or unlit fiber is an unused optical fiber that is available for use in fiber optic communications. Dark Fiber originally referred to the potential network capacity of the telecommunications infrastructure. Dark fiber can be leased from a network service provider. Because the marginal cost of installing additional fiber optic cables after digging or laying a trench is very low, a large excess of fiber was installed during the telecommunications boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This overcapacity was later referred to as "dark fiber" after the dot-com crash in the early 2000s, which briefly reduced the demand for high-speed data transmission. These unused fiber optic cables later created a new market for unique private services that could not be placed on "lighted" fiber optic cables (i.e., cables used in traditional long-distance communications).

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Some of the key players of Dark Fiber Networks Industry:

Comcast Corporation, Interoute Communications Ltd., Zayo Group, FairPoint Communications, Inc., Windstream Services, LLC., Verizon Communications, Inc., NTT Communications, Level 3 Communications, Inc. (CenturyLink, Inc.), AT&T, Inc., Colt Group SA.

Much of the cost of installing cables is related to the civil engineering work required. This includes planning and laying, obtaining permissions, creating ducts and ducts for the cables, and the final installation and connection. This work usually accounts for most of the cost of fiber optic network development. For example, when installing a fiber optic network across the city in Amsterdam, around 80% of the costs were spent on labor and only 10% on fiber. It therefore makes sense to plan and install significantly more fiber optics than are required for current needs in order to guarantee future expansion and to ensure network redundancy if one of the cables fails. Many fiber optic cable owners such as railways and utilities have always built in additional fiber optics to rent to other network operators.

During the dotcom bubble, numerous telephone companies built fiber optic networks with a business plan to enter the telecommunications market by providing a network with sufficient capacity to accommodate all existing and forecast traffic for the entire region served. This was based on the assumption that telecommunications traffic, especially data traffic, would continue to grow exponentially for the foreseeable future. The advent of wavelength division multiplexing reduced the demand for fiber by increasing the capacity of a single fiber by a factor of 100. According to Gerry Butters, former head of Lucent Optical Networking Group at Bell Labs, the amount of data that could be carried by an optical fiber was doubling every nine months at this point. This advance in the ability to transmit data over fibers reduced the need for more fibers. As a result, the wholesale price of data communications collapsed and some of these companies filed for bankruptcy protection. Global Crossing and Worldcom are two high profile examples in the US.