Other Connectivity > Fiber Optic > How to investigate hooking into buried fiber optic cable?

How to investigate hooking into buried fiber optic cable?

Oh god. First of all you need to find out the carrier. A quick gmap shows a ultra rural area and no rail-roads. Only thing would be cross-country fiber conduit because it was easier to lay it there than near the road (no digging problems, etc.) Ok let's say in theory you had $500k-$2-million to break out that fiber that would be...
1. Interrupting the existing circuit between two large metro areas probably in-between multi-terabit re-gen hubs (DWDM) (this is getting less and less with newer technology though.) and it's probably Bay Area/Sacramento-to Boise/Salt Lake City/Reno. That's my guess. So you take a pair and kill off the existing profitable services running in-between the metro areas. (Probably 48 strand no biggie but there's a shortage on trans-continental fiber atm.) You need to build a mini-datacenter. Active cooling, etc. Put a Optical level transceiver to break out the signal in-between the major stop points (major, medium rural cities, i mean this place is FUCKING EMPTY!). So mini CO. This way you can connect to it but still add/drop/multiplex traffic on-to it. So you have 10G in the middle of fucking nowhere. Now you need to multiplex that down into something you can use. Oh and buy IP transit from the carrier that owns the fiber unless you can negotiate a lease to a major city/POP, run your own transport, etc and buy it cheaper there.

If it's Level3 or one of the other big cross-country carriers they are actually offering rural wireless LTE and broadband stimulus access by building out re-gen nodes if your rural area has sufficient broadband demand, currently doesn't have any and THEIR FIBER IN-BETWEEN MAJOR METROS PASSES THROUGH YOUR CITY. See:
»www.level3.com/index.cfm?pageID=454

Never mind, Level3's multi-terabit core now N*10G/N*40G and soon N*100G goes from Sacramento to Salt Lake City with a Reno on-net.

reply to elvey
I'm curious. Give me a google map of the location. The local ILEC is either Frontier Communications or AT&T. Anyways if their off-the grid of POTS they have no hope anyways. The cost doesn't justify the means. Sorry.

reply to elvey
I'm loving this thread.

We don't just use buried fiber as the backbone between large metro areas. I doubt this fiber is that, though I can see how running fiber backbones through quiet places makes sense. I can't see how the fiber like this I saw marked on the road between Boonville and US-101 (»goo.gl/maps/XskJ) could serve as part of a major backbone; it's just not on the way between anywhere major. Come to think of it, CATV often runs over fiber for long distances these days.

Also, fiber-optic signals need boosting. How far do the signals go using the best equipment in common use before needing a boost? Not cross-country!

Google map? of Black Rock City, Nevada? Sure, here: »goo.gl/maps/lIXs. (Though I don't know why you didn't punch "Black Rock City, Nevada" into google maps...)

Also, there IS a railroad nearby. You can see it on google maps, about 2 miles south.

Getting space, A/C and power for the optical transceiver is an already-solved problem; that's already there. This is a city of 50,000 people... for 1 week a year... that could use a lot of bandwidth. (Currently, traffic is over direcpc, wildblue, hdiss.net, and others I don't know about.)
--
AT&T is the world's second-largest SpamHaus and leads an
Organized Crime Syndicate. Also see TURN.org or UCAN.

Most fiber is leased now, so who knows which companies are actually using that cable, and who actually owns it. You have a snowball's chance in hell of finding out, sans digging it up with a backhoe and waiting to see who shows up angry about it.

reply to cob_

Re: How to investigate hooking into buried fiber optic cable?

I seriously doubt you'd get anywhere with them. That cable is already purposed for something greater than helping people in sparse areas get broadband Internet access. If you call the 800#, you're going to get a "Call Before You Dig" responder who may not even be an employee of the company who owns the cable. The reality of American broadband service is that it's deployed where there's a market to make a good profit on it, and nowhere else.
--
"No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority, you can't increase the speed of light."

- RFC 1925

You cannot just tap into Fiber....wow

reply to elvey

reply to elvey
Out in northwest West Virginia, notoriously underserved by anybody, there are posts that say the same thing. I don't know if the break was accidental or not, but Homeland Security and a bunch of other unidentified feds showed up for their broken fiber incident.

Nice right of way for off-roading, though.

Cut it in two and see who complains first! That's who owns it lol.