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Comment by pragmatic | Hacker News Reader

At a "telecom of telecom" we (they) were still lighting up dark fiber 15 years later (2015) when mobile data for cell carriers finally created enough demand. Hard to fathom the amount of overbuild.

The only difference is fiber optic lines remained useful the whole time. Will these cards have the same longevity?

(I have no idea just sharing anecdata)

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New fiber isn't significantly more power efficient. The other side of the coin is that backhoes haven't become more efficient since the fiber was buried.

Directional drilling is a game changer and has become accessible in the last decade.

You're looking for advancement in carriages unaware of the 'automobile' that made 5g and ftth deployment at scale possible.

Directional drilling is not a panacea. There are still places where the terrain is too rocky and aerial construction is the only way to control costs.

> Will these cards have the same longevity?

The article cites anecdotal 1-2 years due to the significant stress.

In 2005 telecom was a cash cow because of long distance charges and if your mechanical phone switch was paid off you were printing money (regulations guaranteed revenue)

This didn't last that much longer and many places were trying to diversify into managed services (data dog for companues on Orem network and server equipment,etc) which they call "unregulated" revenue.

Add written an things business, irrational exuberance can kill you.

I think the chips themselves won't have longevity, but the r&d gone into them is useful. Question is whether the value of that can be captured.

Depends on which companies we're talking about. Nvidia's annualized operating income is so high right now that it'll be capturing more value (op income) in the next four quarters (~$120 billion) than its R&D expenditures have cost over its 32 year history combined. For Nvidia the return has long since been achieved.

As the AI spending bubble gives out, Nvidia's profit growth will slow dramatically (single digits), and slamming into a wall (as Cisco did during the telecom bubble; leading up to the telecom crash, Cisco was producing rather insane quarter over quarter growth rates).

I think the high-density data centers that are being built to support the hyperscalers are more analogous to the dark fiber overbuild. When you lit that fiber in 2015, you (presumably) were not using a line card bought back in 1998.

Everything in that data center is depreciating as soon as they turn on the power.

AC, ups, generators not to mention the severs.

That's the thing with fiber it was still useful. The cards at either end are easy to add, waaaayyy cheaper and higher perf (they're were no cards on end of dark lines) 15 years later.

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