RR...fun ...In Deed......have had my 'flight bag ' in hand for longer than I care to remember..........
Who's in charge here..........?
Who's on first...?
Stay well
Tim
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. |
