Shedding light on dark fiber and the lack thereof

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By Stephen Lee and Jennifer Jones

(IDG) -- Dan Woods, CTO of Capital Thinking, a New York software development company, may not be able to resolve the growing debate of whether there is a glut of unused fiber optic capacity in long-haul networks. But he is feeling the acute pain of a lack of last-mile connectivity into his office.

"We're in a 20-floor building, and there are two to three tenants on each floor. When is it going to be worth [a carrier's] time to get us up on fiber?" asked Woods, a member of InfoWorld's CTO Advisory Council.

Faced with a shortage of fiber in metro areas, infrastructure vendors are scrambling to come up with new ways to provide fiber bandwidth to enterprises.

Several recent developments point to an industry looking for optical options.

One idea is free-space optics, a nascent technology that uses lasers to send optical signals through the air. Free-space vendor LightPointe Communications in San Diego nailed down $33 million in funding from Cisco Systems this month. Meanwhile, Lucent Technologies unveiled its own free-space optical system, known as WaveStar OpticAir.

Other advancing technologies also promise to help alleviate the metro fiber crisis, including DWDM (dense wave division multiplexing), a technology that allows several data streams to be transmitted over a single fiber.

On the DWDM front, XO Communications in Reston, Va., unveiled a new DWDM-based service this week that promises enterprises sole use of a single wavelength of light on a fiber-optic strand.

In another move to extend fiber deeper into the metro areas, Cisco snapped up San Jose, Calif.-based startup AuroraNetics earlier this month -- Cisco's only acquisition so far this year.

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AuroraNetics' advanced RPR (resilient packet ring) technology allows service providers to build 10Gbps metropolitan networks and bring greater scalability to packet-switched networks.

This mad dash for fiber in metro areas stands in sharp contrast to a so-called fiber glut, allegedly existing in transport networks across the country.

Talk of a fiber glut heated up earlier this month when Wall Street analyst firm Merrill Lynch declared that only two percent to three percent of the nation's fiber is actually in use.

For the enterprise, the claim that providers are sitting on top of untapped fiber resources can be aggravating, especially since last-mile optical-based services remain elusive and costly.

Others argue vehemently that there is no fiber glut whatsoever, though unused fiber does exist in backbone networks, which carriers are poised to use as necessary.

"Whether there is or isn't a fiber glut is not the problem. It's an issue of capacity, and there is no capacity glut," said Fred Briggs, CTO of WorldCom in Clinton, Miss.

WorldCom claims it has lit dark-fiber connections to 67,000 buildings across the globe, with almost 50,000 of those in the United States. Briggs says WorldCom plans to continue expanding that number month to month.

But even providers such as WorldCom are prepared to admit that the cost of rolling out fiber connections is high. That rollout, for instance, requires city permits, trenching, and the installation of electronics to distribute access throughout the buildings being hooked up.

This steep overhead has shut out companies such as Fusion, an enterprise software company in Seattle's historic Pioneer Square district, where fiber is scarce.

Fusion Vice President Anthony Falco maintains that his company is a victim of the critical mass syndrome, where carriers and service providers refuse to extend connectivity to buildings that do not offer a sufficient customer base.

"When you're in a building that hasn't been wired, the [providers] don't want to deliver wires just to you. They want to do it for the whole building," Falco said.

Enterprises that try to buy or lease their own dark fiber have encountered similar roadblocks.

ACTS Retirement-Life Communities, an assisted-living development in West Point, Pa., looked into the possibility of leasing fiber to connect its 10 locations.

"It wasn't financially feasible," said Dan Brindell, ACTS' director of network engineering. "We have relatively small sites, and it was too expensive for us. We would have had to pay for the construction from the nearest ring into our facilities. So there was quite a bit of capital costs, digging-up-the-parking-lot-type costs."

Some entities such as Drexel University in Philadelphia meet critical mass criteria and are lucky enough to be located close to fiber.

"Getting fiber was relatively easy, because we're geographically blessed," said Kenneth Blackney, Drexel's director of core technology infrastructure.

Research backs up the assertion that demand remains high for fiber and its broadband equivalent. Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., reported that 82 percent of the companies they polled expressed a need for more bandwidth for next-generation applications, including streaming video, optical storage, mobile data, and b-to-b partnerships.

To satisfy that chorus of demand, WorldCom's Briggs said his company and other providers are looking hard at new technologies such as DWDM to help expand their bases of fiber connections. Gigabit Ethernet is another option, he added.

Fiber optimization strategies might provide plenty of room for growth. Researchers at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs recently said optical fiber can theoretically support 100Tbps -- far more than the 2Tbps of most current fiber networks.

The DWDM model also eases the cost burden for enterprises, according to Indrajit Roy, marketing manager of Cisco's metropolitan business unit. "People don't have to come to the service provider with a truckload of money," he said.

Equipment makers like Cisco have also been highly active in the DWDM market. The San Jose, Calif.-based titan recently rolled out a high-capacity version of its DWDM-based, ONS 15454 optical platform, which moves data at 10Gbps.

In June, Lucent unveiled its Metropolis line of products aimed at relieving MAN (metropolitan area network) bottlenecks. Metropolis addresses problems associated with the metro mess -- the mixture of different technologies and infrastructures existing within the urban core.

Earlier this month, Nortel Networks of Brampton, Ontario, announced 14 optical products that promise better functional integration and enhanced network simplicity.

For now, enterprises can rest assured that metropolitan and long-haul networks will continue to see buildouts, predicts Russ McGuire, chief strategist at TeleChoice in Tulsa, Okla.

McGuire rebuts the suggestion that because of financial duress carriers are sitting on planned metro-network upgrades instead of moving forward.

"There will be tremendous growth in applications, even in the worst-case scenarios. But carriers are going to aim to be as smart as they can be in terms of where to invest capital and what to do in order to meet the demands of end-users," he says.