How Fiber Barons Plunged Nation Into Telecom Glut
By Rebecca Blumenstein
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
DENVER -- As he rushed to lace America with fiber-optic cable, James Crowe
wasn't the sort to let anything stand in his way - not the Rocky Mountains
and certainly not his crosstown rival, Joseph Nacchio.
By 1999, when Mr. Crowe's Level 3 Communications Inc. started digging a line
connecting Denver and Salt Lake City, Mr. Nacchio's Qwest Communications
International Inc. had already threaded its own cable through the most
direct route, a seven-mile railway passage through the granite of the
Continental Divide. Undeterred, Level 3 swerved an extra 70 miles through
southern Wyoming, installing fiber at a blistering 19-mile-per-day pace.
But now, Level 3 has hit a wall even Mr. Crowe may have trouble overcoming.
The company's original ambition - to build history's largest, most advanced
fiber-optic network to carry exploding amounts of Internet traffic - is now
part of one of the biggest gluts the country has ever seen.
All told, about 39 million miles of fiber-optic cable stretch underneath
U.S. railroad beds, corn fields, natural-gas lines and roads, enough to
circle the earth 1,566 times. Companies racing to build or expand nationwide
networks laid some $90 billion of fiber during the past four years. Merrill
Lynch & Co. estimates that only 2.6% of the capacity is actually in use.
Much of it may remain dark forever. |
