Dark fiber is just what it sounds like – fiber that has not been lit with electronics. Most fibers that have been built have extra pairs that are not used. Every fiber provider needs some extra pairs for future use in case some of the existing lit pairs go bad or get damaged too badly to repair. And some other pairs are often reserved for future construction and expansion needs. But any pairs above some reasonable safety margin for future maintenance and growth are fiber pairs that are likely never going to be used.
The FCC has wrangled with dark fiber in the past. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 included language that required the largest telcos to lease dark fiber to competitors. The FCC implemented this a few years later and for a while other carriers were able to lease dark fiber between telephone exchanges. But the Bell companies attacked these rules continuously and got them so watered down that it became nearly impossible to put together a network this way. But it is still possible to lease dark fiber using those rules if somebody is determined enough to fight through a horrid ordering process from a phone company that is determined not to lease the dark fiber.
The stimulus grant rules also required that any long-haul fibers built with free federal money must provide for inexpensive access to competitors willing to build the last mile. I don’t know the specific facts of the Citynet dispute, but I would guess that the stimulus fiber is part of what they are fighting over.
The stimulus grants in West Virginia are about the oddest and most corrupt of all of the stimulus grants that were awarded. The stimulus grant went originally to the State of West Virginia to build a fiber line that would connect most counties with a fiber backbone. There were similar fiber programs in other states. But in West Virginia, halfway through construction, the network was just ‘given’ to Verizon, who was the phone company at the time. The grant was controversial thereafter. For instance, the project was reduced from 915 miles to 675 miles, yet the grant was not reduced from the original $42 million. This means the final grant cost a whopping $57,800 per mile compared to similar stimulus grants that cost $30,000 per mile.
According to the federal rules that built the fiber, Citynet and any other competitor is supposed to get very cheap access to that fiber if they want to use it for last mile projects. If they don’t get reasonable access those grants allowed for the right to appeal to the FCC or the NTIA. However, the stimulus grants were not specific about whether this was to be dark fiber or bandwidth on lit fiber.
But this fight raises a more interesting question. Almost every long-haul fiber that has been built contains a lot of extra pairs of fiber. As I just noted in another recent blog, most rural counties already are home to half a dozen or more fiber networks that almost all contain empty and un-used fiber.
We have a rural bandwidth problem in the country due to the fact that it’s relatively expensive to build fiber in rural places. Perhaps if the FCC really wants to solve the rural bandwidth shortage they ought to take a look at all of the dark fiber that is already sitting idle in rural places.
It would be really nice if the FCC could force any incumbent – be that a cable company, telco, school system, state government, etc.– that has dark fibers in rural counties to be forced to lease it to others for a fair price. This is something that could be made to only apply to those places where there is a lot of households that don’t have access to FCC-defined broadband.
We don’t actually have a fiber shortage in a lot of places – what we have instead is a whole lot of fiber that has been built on public rights-of-way that is not being used and that is not being made available to those who could use it. It’s easy to point the finger at companies like Frontier, but a lot of the idle fiber sitting in rural places has been built by government entities like a school district or a Department of Transportation, that is not willing to share it with others. That sort of gross waste of a precious resource is shameful and there ought to be a solution that would make truly idle fiber available to those who would use it to bring broadband to households that need it.