Lighting Up Dark FiberLighting Up Dark Fiber

If you can't get dark fiber from a carrier, try these other resources.

A source of frustration for many companies comes when needing to connect two or more buildings that are either visible to each other or, even worse, within walking distance. What are their options? Licensed and unlicensed radio, VSAT, VPNs, private lines... maybe even the proverbial two cans and a string. Copper? Fiber?

Copper is noisy and, in spite of technological advances, remains electrically vulnerable and limited in carrying capacity. But the barrier to installing outside plant in public places doesn't usually happen with private fiber, and unused fiber may prove the viable choice. As you can see in the picture below, we have fiber -- and plenty of it -- installed at one of our campus locations. We need a pair, OK two would be nice, for redundancy and aggregation -- and three would even be better to connect two key buildings to each other. Unfortunately, carrier fiber runs aren't always available to customers that would like to interconnect buildings. Such is not a cost-effective offering for a carrier in some situations.

In such cases, here's a sampling of dark fiber resources:

Copper plant has served, and continues to serve, us when modern technology dumps or has its reboot. The reality is fiber is more resilient and it forgives many sins within networks by hiding them with performance and bandwidth that everyone wants. But these aren't the justifications for fiber and as anyone laying in outside plant knows, fiber has numerous short- and long-term benefits for providers as well as customers.

Dark fiber provides solutions for:

Dark fiber accounts for an estimated 3 to 4% of the market, according to industry estimates, with an annual growth rate of less than 6% in recent years.

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