Talk about getting screwed at high speed

[cd34]

Originally Posted by RawAlex

The other part of this that is really funny is that there are thousands of miles of dark fiber out there going city to city and point to point because too much was built in the wrong places.

In Florida, dark fiber must be tagged and is assigned property tax. The entire path is mapped including termination points, and is labelled.

When a telecom company stops paying property tax, that fiber becomes property of the state. Since it is documented, it can be resold to cover the taxable cost. We also have a state tax based on the number of ethernet ports on our networks.

The reason there is so much dark fiber out there is two-fold:

Fiber was the End All Be All to our data woes. Unlimited bandwidth, every investor jumped in, every company ran fiber that could get right-of-ways at a cost of about $10k/mile. Everyone built their networks, but, the clients never came.

Because there was so much dark fiber laid and not used, companies went out of business. since termination and route maps were not maintained, much of the fiber in the ground is destined to stay dark forever. Even companies that installed their own fiber have lost route maps and relay cable all the time because they don't have a firm grasp on what they already have.