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"I come up with the 100,000 miles costing 50 cents a foot for the installed high bandwidth network ocean cables. Dirt cheap."

So cheap it's almost worthless. Sorta like a run-down neighborhood where 90% of the homes are unoccupied, you just don't get much interest from buyers.

Well, 90% of fiber is unused. The business plans that fleeced the fiber investors were all junk. It was a fad. People who had done little more in life than hear the word "fiber" sunk big bucks into dot-com style "looks good on paper" scams.

So we've had our fiber boom and we've had our fiber bust.

The true-believers will gamble that existing fiber assets are worth owning - to be prepared for a future land/fiber rush.

They may even be right, but I wouldn't gamble my money on them.

Buying last years technology, in the hopes that it will be worth something MORE in five years is a bad bet that runs against Moore's Law.

Technology after all only gets cheaper, so why buy now when 90% of fiber can't produce any revenue?

I think you need to look at this in a slightly different way. I would agree with you that it is over built, but not to the extreme proportions you lay out.

I have no idea where you live, but let's say you live in a typical surburban neighborhood with single family homes. Say there are 20 homes on the block in which you live, and each home has from 2 to 6 people living in it. Stop to think just how many miles of copper wire are used to provide those homes with basic electrical service. Wires to each and every outlet, switch and light fixture. Now how much of that wire is actually "lit" at any given time?

A couple might have a few lights on while watching the TV, with the air conditioner running in the background, probably using only 1 or 2% of the "cable" resources they have available to them. A larger family will naturally have a lot more going on, but there are also families on vacation using even less power than the couple.

But if any of them need more services, the capacity is there and ready to be used. As you mentioned, the wire is so cheap it is almost worthless. That is, until you turn the switch on to see what that strange noise was, and at that time it becomes valuable beyond measure.

Stay safe.