A dark fibre or unlit fibre is an unused optical fibre, available for use in fibre-optic communication. Dark fibre originally referred to the potential network capacity of telecommunication infrastructure. Dark fibre may be leased from a network service provider.
…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. The advent of wavelength-division multiplexing reduced the demand for fibre by increasing the capacity of a single fibre by a factor of as much as 100. According to Gerry Butters, the former head of Lucent's Optical Networking Group at Bell Labs, the amount of data that could be carried by an optical fibre was doubling every nine months at the time. This progress in the ability to carry data over fibre reduced the need for more fibres. As a result, the wholesale price for data communications collapsed and a number of these companies filed for bankruptcy protection as a result. Global Crossing and Worldcom are two high-profile examples in the United States.
Similar to the Railway Mania, the misfortune of one market sector became the good fortune of another, and this overcapacity created a new telecommunications sector.
