And this from a conservative

[Chris Beggy]

"Hakki Alacakaptan" <nucleus at superonline.com> writes:

>  || Since last October's self-confessed freak-out when the WSJ's
>  || figures on the
>  || minuscule fibre-optic lighting rate brought home to the
>  || Charlies on the FOMC
>  || that what we'd been hammering away at for a year - namely that
>  || this was a
>  || monstrous malinvestment Bubble, not a New Era
>
> Excuse my dimness, what does fibre-optic lighting have to with the tech
> bubble?

/Lit fiber/ and /dark fiber/ are industry terms for optical fiber
transmission bundles which are in use and not in use
respectively.  The unlit fiber represents excess capacity which
can be quickly put to use, /lit/, if it can be sold.  

I think you get the drift from that.

Here's more if you have the time...

There is general agreement that there is a lot of unused
transmission capacity, and controversy over how much and what the
market clearing price is, if any.  Meanwhile, advances in
transmission technology are *increasing* the transmission
capability of the existing fiber, reducing the value of unlit
fiber.

Somebody recently said that "information may want to be free, but
optical fiber costs $1 million/mile," because building and
burying the cable is very expensive.  Thus it pays to install
future capacity (dark fiber) in each cable buried.  With the
financing of public capital markets, Global Crossing, Level3,
Qwest, et al. ordered cable and equipment from Corning, Lucent,
JDS Uniphase, et al. to build networks after the Telecom Act of
1996.  Investors and operators evidently believed a 1996 report
that internet data traffic was doubling every six months and
would continue to do so.  Now in 2002, with the low utilization
rates and falling prices, these companies are not on course for
profitability any time soon.

In 1992, George Gilder wrote in Forbes ASAP that about 50% of
the US' installed optical fiber was dark.  He used that to
declare, that just as the price of computing had fallen, so would
the price of digital transmission fall even faster.  Since that
time, the utilization rates and therefore prices, have only gone
down, proving him right on that score.

At the end of the summer, he wrote a WSJ editorial, where he
explained that the failure of the telecosm, his word for the
fiber optic buildout, was the failure to provide enough consumers
with the ability to connect adequately to the high speed network.

The WSJ also reported in August that a Merrill Lynch analyst
calculated the utilization rate of *lit* fiber in the US to be
between 3% and 15% in 2001.

Chris