Carriers beefing up capacity. Sign of things to come?

Recently there has been a bit of a race to add capacity by the big carriers. Some in the blogosphere like Broadband Reports that are declaring this a sign of the end of the “glut”. There is also so much chicken little style reporting about the end of the internet and future traffic jams.
My turn to add a perspective. Having been personally involved in helping to build the “glut” in the late 90’s, I can give you a better picture of the so called glut. The real glut is in fiber in the ground. It began in the 90’s when wavelength multiplexing was far more primitive than today, and when there was a race to secure right of ways for fiber. New companies like were born out of owning night of ways like rail lines, oil pipelines, and the like. There was a wait for optical fiber and the prices were high. Every company in the game knew they were overbuilding capacity, but there was a fear that a competitor would take to right of way of they did not. The race ended when multiplexing technologies began to take hold, and the most useful right of ways were wired. Quite a few companies disappeared, with their buried assets left unused. The carriers that remained lit up fiber as needed, with lots of capacity to spare. Recently there has been an active after market for this unused or dark fiber, but not to the extent that is is rare or scarce.
The recent network upgrades by the big carriers that have been in the news have been mostly plug and play. That means they are using existing fiber, and in many cases are just improving the carrying capacity of fiber that was already handling traffic.

I’m not trying to say that there is not a need for new capacity. Some backbone segments are running short of existing dark fiber, and there are many under served and completely unserved secondary loops that should be built. Most importantly, with very few exceptions that last mile is under served. Our current crop American business and government leaders have been extremely short sighted in building for the future to the point of complete incompetence. Having said all of this, there is still quite a bit of dark fiber in the ground waiting for someone to light it up.