-—————That isn’t the problem. This is mostly backbone and inter-city stuff. Load problems come because ISP’s didn’t build-out their local networks enough to support the bandwidth they’ve sold to customers.——————
I see what you mean. This isn’t a coast-to-coast issue. It’s a NYC-to-NYC issue.(for example)
We’ve got fat coast-to-coast pipes. Locally a bunch of customers are connected by, say, cable. All that cable is centralized in a neighborhood connection, which goes upstream to another centralization, etc, then goes out on the backbone. Each of these connections has a bandwidth limit.
Try opening a command prompt. Type “tracert freerepublic.com”
How many items listed look like they belong to your ISP? That’s all traffic within your ISP before it goes out. This is the network that too many ISPs haven’t built out enough to meet the demands of the paying customers.
Dark fiber is normally bought by network companies to ship data from datacenters (a.k.a., the servers you hit on the Internet), with large companies to work with their own datacenters (Google), example to provide the network connectivity to the wireless carriers (that 3G has to hit the ground at some point), or they’re the guys your ISP gets its internet access from. This stuff is way above consumer level, the big guys. When a company actually buys the physical fiber, it’s usually buying hundreds or thousands of miles of it.
Right now there’s a network peering dispute between the long haulers and ISPs. Specifically, Comcast wants to change the traditional peering agreement with the Tier 1 (big backbone) Level 3 Communications. Such disputes are common, but this one is special since it was triggered by traffic from a specific source, Netflix, which competes with Comcast’s own offerings. Search “level 3 comcast peering dispute” for more info. But that isn’t really an issue of bandwidth, but money.