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After the dot-com bubble burst, what happened to thousands of miles of fibre-optic cable laid during the boom?
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A. It was dug up and recycled
80 votes (17.4%)
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B. Governments bought most of it
99 votes (21.5%)
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C. Much of it sat unused waiting for demand to catch up
193 votes (42.0%)
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D. It was converted into electricity cables
88 votes (19.1%)
Total votes: 460
Answer: C — Much of it sat unused waiting for demand to catch up.
The telecom boom produced so much excess fibre that the unused strands acquired their own name: “dark fibre”. Companies had laid enormous amounts because once a trench was open, adding extra fibre was relatively cheap. When the dot-com bubble burst, demand temporarily fell far short of all that capacity.
But the fibre wasn’t necessarily wasted. The explosion of internet traffic, cloud computing and digital services gave that infrastructure new uses. In other words, one generation’s speculative overbuild helped provide infrastructure for the next generation’s technology.