dark fiber, where is it?

does anyone know if I could find out if there's dark fiber in my area? would be interested in using it for goverment uses(yea, we can buy it up, but they don't have maps on these things for some odd reason....)

is there a database or anything?

I’ve never heard of a database, if you’re a municipality you’ll likely find it cheaper to lay your own using existing right-of-way then to buy strands from someone else.

If you’re looking for something small and local contact the telco or power utility about using telephone poles for your own fiber (in my area it’s around $25/month per pole). If you’re looking long haul find the nearest newly renovated roadway and see if they laid fiber during construction. Barring that you could try calling around to any large corporation that has a decent presence to see if they laid anything and would be willing to share (they probably won’t though). It’s not worth calling any ISP, since they make money selling traffic, not letting you get off cheap with your own wire.

How big a network are they looking to have?

Well, dark fiber usually relates to fiber optic that is not active or not lit up. Its gonna be really hard to find out what dark fiber you have in your area. Fiber isn't laid by one sole company, there can be many different telcom companies laying their own fiber. And fiber isn't usually marked by who laid it.

When I worked for the cable company a few years ago, we always had a joke. If you are digging and you find fiber, and you don't know who owns it, cut it and see who shows up Obviously a bad idea. But back to the point. There are no databases that I know of that are going to show this type of information. Your best bet would be to call the phone company and find out who you would need to talk to if you were going to "call before you dig" They *might* give you a copy of their plant print, but I seriously doubt it.

Other than that, I don't really have any other suggestions. What exactly are you needing it for?

well we have the municipal building, police, public works and police has 2 substations
I wanna do a domain based logins off of one central server, so I figured it'd be easiest to set it up myself so when I leave(I'm a frosh in college, once I graduate I'm not sure I'll work there) it can just be left alone 'n work. was looking into vpn's, but than each place hasta have it's own net with static ip and fairly good bandwith, if I did internal fiber I could just drop one big t1 or even oc3 if they need it

In that scenario dark fiber isn’t the answer. It’s going to be unlikely that anyone has spare strands close to those buildings in a layout that works for a small WAN, and the price is going to be high. I’d suggest doing business class cable or DSL and using point-to-point VPN tunnels to connect the network in each building, no static IP required on the desktop. It’s a relatively cheap way to get a WAN and you’ll get better support then doing T1s.

If the buildings are close, I still say trench some fiber or lease some telephone pole space and get business DSL or cable for internet access. That’s still pretty cheap and gives them plenty of bandwidth. I doubt they need an OC3, but on the other hand I work for Verizon and I’m sure we’ll sell you one anyway.

but if I do that don't they all need a line capable of supporting all the network traffic?(they'll all be using ...word....eh, that setting where all the my documents and stuff is stored remotely), and for the VPN's to stay connected dont' all the connections have to be static?

The company, Level3, owns most of the dark, and lit fiber in the US. You could probably call them to find out if they have any fiber in your area.

http://www.level3.com/

If you’re set on doing folder redirection then you should consider dropping a cheap file server at each site to host home folders and maybe some print and file shares. You can do folder-redirection over a WAN, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’ve either got small sites or plenty of bandwidth. You run into sluggishness all over the place since Windows seems to poll the My Documents folder for nearly every task a user can perform.

Only the VPN devices need to know what that is, and they provide routes to the LANs like a regular router would. The desktops can pickup private addressing from a DHCP server and talk to each other across the tunnel created by the VPNs at each site. With business class DSL/cable you’ll have the option of static WAN IP so there’s no need to constantly update the VPNs. The bandwidth is usually comparable to T1, and cheaper. (full T1s generally go for around $500/month per site depending on bunch of things). The ISP may also offer secure virtual WANs as part of their service.

Nothing beats a spool of fiber and a shovel if you can get away with it though.

Don't forget that when you run traffic over a VPN tunnel, that the effective throughput is dropped in half due to the encryption overhead and what not. I would not attempt any VPN WAN solution for high traffic unles it was on a minimum of a buisness class DSL service such as SDSL 1mbps/1mbps. I would attempt to shy away from ADSL as its service is bursty, and you typcially are oversubscribed (in larger cities more so) at the DSLAM. By using SDSL you are most likely going with an ISP that has a better subscription rate, meaning that for every user there is X ammount of bandwidth. Also, SDSL is a lot more similar to a T1, at lower cost. You get a SLA whch dictates the quality of service, ammount of downtime that is acceptable before the line is repaird typically measured in hours, and so on. With ADSL, you get nothing, so your line could be down and out for days before anyone lifted a finger to fix the problem.


As for the dark fiber, ditto on what everyone else is saying. You live in New Jersey, so Verizon should be your local big carrier. Might try contacting their buisness contact.

Besides. Do you really want or have the money for the equipment to use single mode fiber? The end points alone are thousands of dollars. That does not include the tech to bring it onto the premise, the punchdown and termination to the equipment, and so on.

Good DSL info.

I’ve never seen a VPN tunnel reduce available user bandwidth by half, but I agree there is some performance hit (I’ve seen as much as 20%, usually much less). By using a dedicated VPN concentrator at each site you’re offloading the CPU load to a box that won’t have to worry about more then a couple of MBs per second peak, which isn’t that much. Having a stable tunnel keeps the handshakes to a minimum too.

If the buildings are close enough you can get away with multimode FX fiber building to building (2km line distance limit). Some SOHO class equipment would run you around $500 per site to anchor the lines. I forgot about tipping the fiber and yeah, that can be price to do properly. I’m telling you, shovel + fiber = bliss.

There is a boatload of dark fiber in the northeastern part of the country. I used to be a fiber optic technician for WorldCom and would commission and provision new systems. Most of it was OC-192 and I did do some work on terabit. WorldCom has renamed itself MCI due to all the negative publicity it got for the 400 Billion dollars of corporate fraud Bernie Ebbers (CEO) and his cronies committed which resulted in massive layoffs. WorldCom basically was a company that was built mostly by buying up over 70 companies and putting them together, the biggest purchase being MCI. UUNET is one of the companies that was also bought and that name still survives. UUNET offers wholesale internet service. Despite the corporate corruption, the company has solid technology. Anyway, do a search for any of the terms I have provided. Did I mention I now work at a retail auto parts store for about 15K/year? Sure is a far cry from the 90K/year I was making at WorldCom.

’ve never seen a VPN tunnel reduce available user bandwidth by half, but I agree there is some performance hit (I’ve seen as much as 20%, usually much less)

Click to expand...

They say the hit comes from running tcp inside itself.