..."more than 97% of fiber-optic capacity goes unused."? That is unimaginable. ...
I would call it imaginable but misleading. The fiber network constructors like Level 3, once having gone to the time and expense of routing, huts, trenching, and terminating facilities, found it a minor additional expense to throw in 5 or 10 times the physical fiber lines in those trenches. Level 3 as I recall, installed 150 or so fiber pairs in its major cross country routes, as well as as much again empty conduit.
Apply today's max equipment capability to all that unused cross country fiber and I can see someone arriving at a 97% figure. But most of this is dark or completely unconnected fiber. The terminal capability (eg metro rings or general "last 30 miles" facilities), to say nothing of the "last mile" facilities, are not there and no one has paid for them yet. Picture in Washington DC or New York, the work required to get from a few regional network centers to having all the businesses in the area wired up with fiber.
On general overcapacity, Global Crossing has in its business plan I believe a planned 40% or so per year drop in revenue per bandwidth unit, so overcapacity is not a surprise to anyone.
On a different topic, note from that article that a desperate Northpoint got $135 million for its 'DSL footprint' facilities in local Bell central office buildings, which the article said was 50 cents on the dollar of cost. This implies that eg Covad and Rythms are sitting on serious monetizable assets where they have shoehorned non-Bell space and equipment into Bell facilities.
Regardless, I think the general thrust of the article will turn out true, that a lot of the small new 'telco' companies will be going under or getting bought out, and perhaps a few of the big telco's will fall under the weight of 3G license debt and bad acquisition costs versus slowing economy and insufficient or non-existent demand.
- Dway |
