Emerging Markets
In the last decade, many higher education institutions have bought up large quantities of existing fiber optics sitting dormant. Starting in 1999, Larry Starr, a technology director from the University of Illinois, connected the Urbana-Champaign campus to major academic, research, and telecommunications facilities in the Chicago area. At the same time, other schools began creating large urban networks to directly connect their school campuses with hospitals and large telecommunications companies in metropolitan areas. Since then, the U.S. research and education (R&E) community have been aggressively pursuing a revolutionary new means for delivering advanced networking capabilities. With the plummeting prices of fiber due to the over abundance, the option to own fiber networks has stomped out the competition leasing of commercial circuits elsewhere. Experts say that a mile of dark fiber that in the past would sell for $1,200 has sold, for as low $200 or less. The downturn in telecommunications has offered significant savings to schools, since intercity networks may include several hundred to several thousand miles of fiber optic cable.
Read more about this topic: Dark Fibre
Famous quotes containing the words emerging and/or markets:
“That which is given to see
At any moment is the residue, shadowed
In gold or emerging into the clear bluish haze
Of uncertainty. We come back to ourselves
Through the rubbish of cloud and tree-spattered pavement.
These days stand like vapor under the trees.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street. When the Boys are in a good mood, the market thrives; when they get scared or sullen, it is time for each one of us to look into the retail apple business.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)