Intel chairman Andy Grove made a wry little observation about investor losses in his cover interview in the June issue of Wired magazine. Investors who watched alternative carriers collapse overnight may feel they have been taken to the cleaners, Grove said, but in reality they paid the equivalent of a tax on metropolitan fiber deployment that probably got them much better returns than any government effort at fiber buildout. Grove pointed out that when he was involved in panel discussions with cable and incumbent phone executives in the mid-1990s, prior to the Internet boom, the extension of fiber to second- and third-tier metropolitan areas was predicted to take five times as long as it actually took.
This observation may not ease the pain of day traders. "There may be something down in that deep conduit I got for my money," they will whine, "but when will I realize something from the dark fiber that lies beneath?" Perhaps sooner than they think.
The current discussion over Ethernet, Resilient Packet Ring and Sonet topologies is all about aggregating packet and circuit traffic in those fiber rings that supercarriers want to make available on a wholesale basis.
Packet-centric carriers like Yipes and Telseon are pointing out that much of the attention has turned from the long-haul core networks of Qwest and Level 3, to the metro networks where multiple traffic types will coexist.
The fact that we're realizing a fiber bargain that goes far beyond the Sonet of yesteryear only reinforces the continued access crush we're seeing in the last mile. Everyone in this market is playing winner take all. The cable TV multisystem operators are rejecting advertisements for digital subscriber line on their networks, while ill-conceived legislation like Rep. Billy Tauzin's sop to the incumbent phone carriers is seeing to it that only the incumbents have a hand in DSL. Just as the metro fiber becomes ubiquitous, broadband last-mile access stops dead in its tracks.
That's why new standards efforts like Ethernet in the First Mile, Metropolitan Ethernet Forum and Resilient Packet Ring Alliance all have a role to play in pushing for an end to the last-mile bottleneck.
If Ethernet over passive optical networks has to be the savior for ramming DSL and cable modems out of the way, well, there's almost enough excess fiber around to do that now. What's important is to solve that last-mile meltdown, clearing the way for that fiber payback that Grove promised us.
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