Dark Fibre - Market

Market

For many years incumbent local exchange carriers would not sell dark fibre to end users, because they believed selling access to this core asset would cannibalise their other, more lucrative services. Incumbent carriers in the US were required to sell dark fibre to competitive local exchange carriers as Unbundled Network Elements (UNE), but they have successfully lobbied to reduce these provisions for existing fibre, and eliminated it completely for new fibre placed for fibre to the premises (FTTP) deployments.

Competitive local carriers were not required to sell dark fibre, and many do not, although fibre swaps between competitive carriers are quite common. This increases the reach of their networks in places where their competitor has a presence, in exchange for provision of fibre capacity on places where that competitor has no presence. This is a practice known in the industry as "coopetition".

Meanwhile, other companies arose specialising as dark fibre providers. Dark fibre became more available when there was enormous overcapacity after the boom years of the late 1990s through 2001. The market for dark fibre tightened up with the return of capital investment to light up existing fibre, and with mergers and acquisitions resulting in consolidation of dark fibre providers.

Dark fibre capacity is typically used by network operators to build SONET and dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) networks, usually involving meshes of self-healing rings. Now, it is also used by end-user enterprises to expand Ethernet local area networks, especially since the adoption of IEEE standards for Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet over single-mode fibre. Running Ethernet networks between geographically separated buildings is a practice known as "WAN elimination".