Is that actually true though? I assumed a lot of it had been lit up since then, and if you assume continued exponential or even linear growth in internet traffic (cable tv becoming a relic of the 20th century, etc), it stands to reason we'll need more backbone capacity as well as more last-mile connectivity.

I'm not even going to get into whether they're being honest about it, but when I called to ask about transferring my service to a new apartment, Verizon told me that they'd stopped rolling out FIOS to new locations because they didn't have the fiber for it.

I kind of just assumed that it was the prelude to asking for more money, but it seems like there's likely some truth to it.

Backbone capacity is not nearly as big of an issue, despite traffic growth. Long haul DWDM systems get denser, higher bit rate transponders get built, etc to push more bits across the same fiber.

The growth of bits/second per fiber has also been exponential.

In a presentation with Tom Jenkins (CEO OpenText) in 2009, he said that the dark fiber was projected to be fully used within a year.

IIRC, I thought that Google was buying up all of the Dark Fiber. I've heard various theories on what will happen with it:

1) Use it to link all their data centers together forming a sort of 'global Google intranet.'

2) Use it as the backbone for their community internet initiatives.

It's also possible to combine those two.