Hidden capacity

It’s no secret that U.S. broadband speeds aren’t all that impressive, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Buried deep underground across the country lie thousands of miles of unused fiber-optic cable that can deliver Internet speeds in excess of 100 gigabits per second, more than 2,500 times faster than the fastest broadband tier of 50 megabits per second that’s available to Time Warner Cable’s residential customers in New York City.

This unused cable, which is known as dark fiber, was laid across the country during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s by telecommunications firms looking to invest their excess capital, said Mike Spieldenner of NEF Fiber, a Boston-based telecom consulting firm that specializes in dark fiber.

The reason for the glut is that “the cost of deploying fiber is more expensive than” the fiber bundle itself, said Spieldenner. So if a company laid one strand of fiber optic cable or 100 strands, the most expensive portion of the deployment cost is the construction.

In short, there was an incentive to overbuild capacity.

Unfortunately for the companies that first laid the fiber optic cable, from Qwest Communications (now owned by CenturyLink) to MCI (now owned by Verizon) to AT&T, consumer demand for the speeds offered by fiber-optic cable didn’t materialize as quickly as they’d hoped, as the data-hungry services that would later spur that demand, such as YouTube and Netflix and iTunes, didn’t launch until several years later.

“The cost [to install the dark fiber] is sunk,” said Spieldenner. “In some cases it has been either written down via bankruptcy or via loss accounting.”

Now, while several companies still do own the leftover fiber — Level 3 Communications owns a good portion of it in the New York City area, and makes it available to entities like banks and media conglomerates looking for ultra-fast Internet speeds — oftentimes the owners aren’t interested in actually using it.

Verizon created its FiOS fiber optic network from scratch because it was worried that consumers would leave it in favor of cable companies’ triple play offerings of Internet, TV and telephone access, according to David S. John of Fiber to the Home Council, an advocacy group that promotes fiber-based Internet access.

The network, which offers speeds of up to 150 megabits per second, will be available to every resident of New York City by 2014, owing to an agreement Verizon made with the city in 2008.

But one company that is interested in putting dark fiber to use is Google.

Google’s New York City office also happens to be the location of one of the city’s two “carrier hotels” — a location where several different telecommunications connections terminate. Google is effectively sitting atop an unlimited amount of bandwidth in New York City.

Google declined to say exactly how much dark fiber it owns, though Spieldenner estimates that the company possesses enough fiber around the country to become an Internet service provider overnight if it wanted to.

Google has been buying up dark fiber across the country in recent years and plans to launch an “ultra-fast” fiber optic-based Internet service in Kansas City, Mo., later this year that will deliver speeds of around 1 gigabit per second. That’s fast enough to download, say, the high-definition version of “Moneyball” from iTunes in about 30 seconds.

And while that kind of speed may seem excessive today, Google notes that “the jump from dial-up to broadband has led to streaming online video, digital music sales, video conferencing over the Web, and countless other innovations that have transformed communication and commerce.”

The idea is that, once consumers and businesses have access to this kind of speed, “countless... new innovations” will follow.