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Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

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Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#11

Post by secretsatan »

I was involved in a UK company that strung fibre optics along the high voltage transmission network to quickly build a national network, there was a ridiculous amount of money flowing around hooking up companies, then there wasn't. I got out before it collapsed but you could see it was unsustainable.

Later, due to my experience with the software involved, a colleague and I were tasked with recovering data from another huge firm that collapsed after the boom, walking into a massive empty office with a post it note with a server name and some passwords. Nothing on the db to recover but we had the skills to bypass the security.

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#12

Post by mangeld »

libealistand wrote: post #9

I don't get the drama. To me this looks like a normal process in an industry that discovered a groundbreaking technology. A new technology pops up, everybody rushes to innovate, lots of actors do nonsense, some do the right thing, but for many of them you don't know beforehand which is which. So you throw money at all of them. The rush creates some really good ideas and innovations. And a lot of BS and wrong decision…

Depends on the country, where I live it's pretty common to have fiber to the home. Everything runs on that, internet, cable tv and phone calls.

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#14

Post by sandworm101 »

mangeld wrote: post #12
libealistand wrote: post #9

I don't get the drama. To me this looks like a normal process in an industry that discovered a groundbreaking technology. A new technology pops up, everybody rushes to innovate, lots of actors do nonsense, some do the right thing, but for many of them you don't know beforehand which is which. So you throw money at all of them. The rush creates some really good ideas and innovations. And a lot of BS and wrong decision…

Depends on the country, where I live it's pretty common to have fiber to the home. Everything runs on that, internet, cable tv and phone calls.

But in other areas most residential bandwidth increasingly comes from wireless techs. Even in homes with wired service, nearly everyone uses wifi rather than wires, let alone fiber to end machines. The last mile is generally not fiber, nor is it a literal mile.

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#15

Post by rcxdude »

libealistand wrote: post #10
somat wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

conversely, I think we have been in the singularity since the late 1700's. For many thousands of years human manufacturing capability was effectively flat, a few blips and bumps but the advancement was generally steady and linear. And then in the late 1700's things changed. The graph went hockey stick and has stayed exponential since. However from inside this bubble there is a sort of tech dilatation where everything…

Flat? I don't think so. I'm at a coffee shop and looking around me, this is very different from just 20 years ago. People with laptops and smaetphones around me. Just 20 years ago, that same place saw a few CS major nerds with their laptops, everybody else sat with a book or some paper to write on or reading a paper newspaper. Still with a latte, but tech has changed everybody's life dramatically in 20 years. 20 year…

You're agreeing with the comment you replied to. they were saying it was flat until ~1700 or so.

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#16

Post by martinald »

FWIW this is happening again in the UK right now with FTTH deployments. There are about 10-20 companies of fairly sizeable scale, with hundreds of millions of billons of GBP of funding laying fibre.

I think this is a good thing for the country (it has forced Openreach & Virgin Media to massively accelerate their FTTP plans); but it is going to be cataclysmic for the investors.

Firstly, the build cost is astronomical and completely inefficient, apparently £1000/home is pretty standard, which is 3-10x what openreach and VM are paying (these altnets have access to all the openreach ducting and poles), due to very poor efficiencies in their build process and massively overpaying for materials and labour.

Secondly, they overbuilding like crazy. I had 5 different FTTH providers at my old London apartment available, with totally separate infrastructure. This is meaning takeup is a fraction of what they expected it to be, as for the most part they expected to have at most one competitor at a property.

Third, they seem to have absolutely no idea how to market and acquire customers, since their main skill seems to be how to pitch infrastructure funds to get capital. Their rollout is very patchy nationwide or even a local area so marketing campaigns are hard to do.

There is going to be a huge wave of consolidation (at best) or bankruptcy in the sector as interest rates have risen and the calculus has totally changed.

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#17

Post by rasz »

KirillPanov wrote: post #4

Yeah the phone companies laid those thick 144-strand bundles before wave division multiplexing. They figured the only way to get more bandwidth was more fibers, right? WDM came along and caught them with their pants down; now all of a sudden you could just attach different devices to the ends of the fiber and get 16x the bandwidth. No backhoes needed. Then CWDM let you split and combine channels in locations without…

>before wave division multiplexing. ... WDM came along

Would that be Ciena in 1996?

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#19

Post by iamacyborg »

martinald wrote: post #16

FWIW this is happening again in the UK right now with FTTH deployments. There are about 10-20 companies of fairly sizeable scale, with hundreds of millions of billons of GBP of funding laying fibre. I think this is a good thing for the country (it has forced Openreach & Virgin Media to massively accelerate their FTTP plans); but it is going to be cataclysmic for the investors. Firstly, the build cost is astronomical…

I suppose this is what happens when infrastructure stops being funded by the government.

I’ve got 3 current FTTH providers at my flat in London, I wasn’t even aware other companies were about and also offering the service. I guess this’ll be good for consumer costs in the short term before it inevitably implodes.

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#20

Post by KirillPanov »

jacquesm wrote: post #6
KirillPanov wrote: post #4

Yeah the phone companies laid those thick 144-strand bundles before wave division multiplexing. They figured the only way to get more bandwidth was more fibers, right? WDM came along and caught them with their pants down; now all of a sudden you could just attach different devices to the ends of the fiber and get 16x the bandwidth. No backhoes needed. Then CWDM let you split and combine channels in locations without…

In the meantime though we've started using a substantial fraction of those thick fiber bundles and dark fiber is getting harder and harder to find. Barring another revolution in technology I suspect that at some point we'll be laying even more of those big bundles, or even bigger ones.

> dark fiber is getting harder and harder to find

Only because all of it along any given route now tends to be owned by a single entity. And that entity can simply say "not for sale".

If the market were healthy dark fiber prices would skyrocket instead of availability plummeting.

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