Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Dark fibre
Summary
A dark fibre or unlit fibre is an unused optical fibre, available for use in fibre-optic communication. Dark fibre may be leased from a network service provider.
Dark fibre originally referred to the potential network capacity of telecommunication infrastructure. Because the marginal cost of installing additional fibre optic cables is very low once a trench has been dug or conduit laid, a great excess of fibre was installed in the US during the telecom boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. This excess capacity was later referred to as dark fibre following the dot-com crash of the early 2000s that briefly reduced demand for high-speed data transmission.
These unused fibre optic cables later created a new market for unique private services that could not be accommodated on lit fibre cables (i.e., cables used in traditional long-distance communication).
Much of the cost of installing cables is in the civil engineering work required. This includes planning and routing, obtaining permissions, creating ducts and channels for the cables, and finally installation and connection. This work usually accounts for most of the cost of developing fibre networks. For example, in Amsterdam's citywide installation of a fibre network, roughly 80% of the costs involved were labour, with only 10% being fibre. It therefore makes sense to plan for, and install, significantly more fibre than is needed for current demand, to provide for future expansion and provide for network redundancy in case any of the cables fail. Many fibre-optic cable owners such as railroads and power utilities have always included additional fibres with the intention to lease these to other carriers.
During the dot-com bubble, a large number of telephone companies built optical-fibre networks, each with the business plan of cornering the market in telecommunications by providing a network with sufficient capacity to take all existing and forecast traffic for the entire region served. This was based on the assumption that telecoms traffic, particularly data traffic, would continue to grow exponentially for the foreseeable future.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Related courses (1)
MSE-482: Optical properties of materials
Students will study fundamental principles of light-matter interaction and apply classical and quantum mechanical models for quantitative estimates. Optical phenomena in glasses, organic/inorganic sem
Related publications (38)
Related people (6)
Related concepts (3)
Fiber-optic communication
Fiber-optic communication is a method of transmitting information from one place to another by sending pulses of infrared or visible light through an optical fiber. The light is a form of carrier wave that is modulated to carry information. Fiber is preferred over electrical cabling when high bandwidth, long distance, or immunity to electromagnetic interference is required. This type of communication can transmit voice, video, and telemetry through local area networks or across long distances.
Fiber to the x
Fiber to the x (FTTX; also spelled "fibre") or fiber in the loop is a generic term for any broadband network architecture using optical fiber to provide all or part of the local loop used for last mile telecommunications. As fiber optic cables are able to carry much more data than copper cables, especially over long distances, copper telephone networks built in the 20th century are being replaced by fiber.
Optical fiber
An optical fiber, or optical fibre in Commonwealth English, is a flexible, transparent fiber made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. Optical fibers are used most often as a means to transmit light between the two ends of the fiber and find wide usage in fiber-optic communications, where they permit transmission over longer distances and at higher bandwidths (data transfer rates) than electrical cables.