<nettime> Re: Only 5% of laid fibre is lit in USA

[t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

mgurst@vcn.bc.ca (Tue 06/26/01 at 09:46 AM -0700):

> But the real reason is that the major cost of fibre is digging up the ground
> and once that is done, the incremental cost of another gazillion units of
> bandwidth is very close to zero.  So if laying one fibre is good, laying 20
> is better (and not much more expensive) and laying 100 is even better and
> and so on and then along come the boffins who are continuously at work
> figuring out how to pump more bits through the existing fibre so as to
> increase the return from already sunk fibre (or twisted copper) investments.
> 
> So the argument by the WSJ and everyone else about the amount of unlit fibre
> is for the most part specious... its like criticizing PC owners for the
> amount of unused processing capacity they are getting with their upgrades
> from $3000 486's to $1000 Pentium 3's or whatever--the issue is not the
> amount of unused capacity but simply that the hardware is a necessity and
> the amount of unused capacity is part of the package, adding very little to
> the overall cost.
> 
> The real question, that I haven't seen any figures on is how many installed
> bundles (or the length of installed fibre cables) are currently completely
> unlit.  I would guess that these figures would show a startlingly different
> result and indicate that the industry was probably pretty much on target
> with only a relatively minor overbuild and particularly in heavily
> concentrated markets where the demand would be likely to increase
> exponentially once the applications start rolling out.

these are all good points, but if you push the logic of the final
observations one step further i think you'll find that geographical
distribution isn't just a matter of differences in degree ('this market is
overserved, but that one is underserved'). rather, if the disparities are
extreme enough, it becomes a dif- ference in *kind*: the
'applications'--that is, ways in which it is used--will diverge to such a
degree that they'll become mutually unintelligible. this has been a sort
of ambient issue for several years in (to use a banal example) dis-
cussions about web design vis-a-vis real end-user bandwidth. but the
emergence of consumer-level broadband in *some* areas while other areas
languish in ~28K access will push these kinds of issues to qualitatively
different levels.

we've already seen premonitions of this--for example, last year when there
was a spate of universities tackling the question of whether to filter out
napster traffic. several schools justified doing do by claiming that
napster was satur- ating their institution's connectivity. while i'm
skeptical about that justifi- cation, it's worth noting that there are
other entities that could have made a similar claim--entire nations or
even regions with limited bandwidth, for exam- ple. afaik, none did; but
we've heard lots of noise about LDCs imposing severe restrictions on other
*low-bandwidth* forms of content. by now, we're all very familiar with the
libertarian tendency to lump all these issues together under vague rubric
like the 'free flow of information'; fortunately, there are other ways to
think about how and why these issues are related.

as you note, the major cost of laying fiber lies in digging, not in laying
the fiber once the ground is dug up. as a result, fiber tends to be
distributed in *centralized* patterns--that is, in ways that tend to
entrench 'backbones' and, in doing so, to further marginalize 'peripheral'
areas. or it does so *if* you assume that broadband access is an equity
issue. in a way it is of course; but in other ways it *isn't*, because
growing disparities in the bandwidth that is available to end-users will
translate into growing disparities in *how* people use 'the net.' but
rhetoric about 'information-haves' and '-have-nots' is most- ly nonsense:
the range of services and resources available on the net is broad enough
that it's silly to think about these things in zero-sum terms.

most of what's been said about dark fiber (pro *and* con) is mired in a
supply- side approach to what 'the question' is; but 'build it and they
will come' has been the leitmotif of attempts to commercialize the net, so
it shouldn't be so shocking to see the WSJ et al. inverting their
supply-side assumptions and con- demning the telecom industry for falling
short of pumped-up expectations. more important, i think, is how the fiber
companies' conservatism will probably end up fueling 'convergence' in
oversupplied markets while maintaining differentia- tion of media in
'undersupplied' markets.

cheers,
t



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