> ... passing by along the way the idle fiber infrastructure that the FCC set aside nearly a decade ago.
Can anyone elaborate on what exactly they mean? Is this dark fiber sitting around somewhere? Did the FCC sanction the deployment and private companies built it out (and then ignored it) or was government money spent to lay the wires?
Digging a ditch is expensive. The fiber you put in the ditch is cheap. So if you are already digging a ditch, you load it up with 100x as much fiber as you imagine yourself ever needing in the future.
This is vastly cheaper than digging a second ditch 5-10 years down the line.
I thought he was referring to dormant fiber that the telco owns that used to be available to third-parties at wholesale rates.
It's refereed to today as "dark fiber"; fiber optics that are not active.
However, I don't know that using that dark fiber would improve our internet. The backbones are already extremely fast; it's the downlinks and uplinks that are slow, and I'd guess most dark fiber is not routed to homes.