Google wants 'dark fiber' ( What are they trying to do?)

CNET ^ | January 17, 2005, 4:00 AM PST | Evan Hansen

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Is Google planning to build a global fiber optic network from scratch? And, if so, why?

The question has cropped up in light of a recent job posting on the search engine giant's Web site seeking experts in the field.

"Google is looking for Strategic Negotiator candidates with experience in...(i)dentification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network," the posting reads, in part.

Dark fiber refers to fiber optic cable that's already been laid, but is not yet in use. Thousands of miles of dark fiber is available in the United States, but there have been few takers due to the high costs of making it operational.

A Google spokesman declined to elaborate on the job posting. Still, it raises some tantalizing thoughts, including the long-shot chance that the company is laying the groundwork to jump into the telecommunications business. The posting was reported by Light Reading, a Web site that tracks the optical networking industry.

If Google were to build its own global or national fiber network, the project would likely cost billions of dollars and take years to implement, an investment that would be hard to justify based on the networking needs of most companies. Renting "lit" fiber from carriers is generally a cheaper, and therefore preferred, way to go.

Google is thought to be a shrewd judge of computing value, having built its widely-admired infrastructure on the back of low-budget server clusters. At the same time, curious geeks have long pondered the apparent mismatch between its service demands and the reputed scale of its computing resources.

Dark motivations
A handful of dark-fiber projects have been gaining momentum recently, mostly involving large consortia of private companies, universities and medical facilities, sometimes with heavy government backing. Best-known is Internet2's national LambaRail project, which has bought up some 28,000 route miles of dark fiber through its FiberCo subsidiary, according to Steve Corbato, Internet2's director of network initiatives.

[SierraWasp]

They oughta get with whoever bought Global Crossing! They had more dark fiber than anybody on Earth!!!

Oh! Haven't you heard? The Googlers are up-loading the Earth's libraries (except Clinton's)! That's their business opportunity! Next, they'll up-load the Earth's pubic school system, don'tcha know??? (har)

[BigSkyFreeper]

I've got a friend who works in the telco business and he said 5 or ten years ago during the dot-com boom, fiber was just too expensive to trench and light up. Sure there were fiber lines down back then, but they were far and few between. I can remember in high school back in the late 80's, the local telco wired all the schools together for interactive television and of course they had ITV hubs set up around the eastern part of Montana for teleconferencing, then they expanded to telemedicine, and about the time of the dot-com boom, they were doing telemedicine. Linking the smaller hospitals into the larger ones in the state. While the heart center is over 360 miles away, the specialists at the heart center can actually assist the local physician with heart operations over the ITV link.

Now, back to this friend of mine who works at a telco. He told me that once fiber is rolled out, and installed right up to a person's home, the distance limitations of DSL will be a thing of the past. Fiber has the same amount of capacity to provide enough bandwidth as one one analog television channel, which roughly translates out to about 6 Mbits/second.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Next, they'll up-load the Earth's pubic school system, don'tcha know??? (har

Damn I never thought of that.....ROFL!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I get about 1/4 of that speed.

But seems fast enough!

My reading speed isn't anywhere near fast enough to keep up!

[Petronski]

I thought this was going to be a story about "Super Colon Blow" bran cereal.

[Petronski]

Next, they'll up-load the Earth's pubic school system....

Heh heh heh. You said 'pubic.'

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I missed that....now that is really funny!

[tortoise]

Pure speculation on my part, but first, if Google believes the "dark fiber" is dirt cheap, then it may make sense..It's similar to the airline pioneers staking out routes.

Fiber, unlike wireless and copper, has no intrinsic limit on bandwidth. If you want more bandwidth, you do some comparatively inexpensive upgrades on the terminating equipment which depreciates in value like computers. With reasonably priced terminating hardware today, you'll max out at about a few hundred Gbps full-duplex on a single strand. In a year or two, that number will be a full Terabit per second.

Since it costs a hell of a lot of money and time to lay fiber, and fiber has no real bandwidth limit, it makes sense to buy up dark fiber while it is cheap (like over the last couple years) in places you need bandwidth and do your own termination. You'll be able to use it for decades and the upgrade path is dirt cheap.

Google is probably just buying dark fiber to build a cheap data center fabric that they'll be able to upgrade for negligible cost for the next few decades. The actual cost per Mbps very rapidly approaches zero when you build networks this way. The giant caveat is that you have to know how to build fiber networks, which most companies (and probably Google) do not.

[tortoise]

Fiber has the same amount of capacity to provide enough bandwidth as one one analog television channel, which roughly translates out to about 6 Mbits/second.

Not even close. One strand of fiber today will get you about 100 Gbits/second. For some metro networks, residential hand-offs are 100 Mbps (because Fast Ethernet is an all-but-free hand-off) that go all the way to the IX core. It could be a 1Gbps hand-off, but what would be the point? In practice though, these are rate limited to a several Mbps to keep BitTorrent and P2P under control, which will automatically consume as much bandwidth as one gives them and also tend to attract the wrath of the RIAA and MPAA.

DSL type technologies are limited to the 6 Mbps range. For fiber, it is virtually unlimited though they may rate-shape it for pragmatic reasons.

[BigSkyFreeper]

In all practicality, one will see DSL speeds or slightly more than DSL speeds at the consumer end. The providers could attract customers by offering 100 Gbits/second, but bandwitch isn't exactly free, and 100 Gbits/second isn't exactly cheap.

The attractive part of 100 Gbits/second will be seen on the long haul backbones where the bandwidth won't be wasted in it's use and it's price.

[SierraWasp]

"I missed that...."

Now whudjoosay 'boutcher readin speed up above???

Now that Petronski crack about SNL's Colon Blow commercial... Now THAT'S FUNNNY!!! (as in Dark Fibre)(don't blow it, now, Ern)(the pressure's buildin!!!)

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

This is the Dark Fiber thread.....the Waspman made a pretty liberal interpretation of what it was about.

See #16 for the start ......

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi