Q: For those unfamiliar with it, could you please explain the term Dark Fiber?

MB: Dark fiber is a strand of optical fiber with no electronics or optical gear at either end, hence it is dark and not lit up with a laser.

Q: What is the biggest differentiator between AboveNet and other carriers offering fiber routes?

MB: AboveNet has spent considerable time and money building fiber routes in about 15 metros in the US and London. No company is going to spend that much today to build these ubiquitous fiber rich routes nor is anyone going to lend the money to do so. We may have a few competitors in a market here and there, but they are typically local players.

Often these competitors are a utility company that has some utility right-of- way, and even though it is not their market, they figured they would put some fiber in the ground. But at the end of the day – whether it is a water utility or a power utility company – if there is a water break or if a power line goes down because of an ice storm, they are likely to be focused on restoring the electricity or water, and after that they are going to look at restoring the fiber. Remember, their main business and responsibility is being a utilities company.

So we (AboveNet) may have some competitors in markets, but they are not in all our markets and typically it is not their primary business but just an additional revenue stream for the company.

Beyond that, what also differentiates us is the way we have constructed. Where we could, we have put in multiple conduits. These are 4 inch PVC ducts with three 1.25 inch innerducts where we could put large count fiber cables in, 432 or 864 counts of fiber strands. And when we exhaust the 432 or 864 fiber cable, we still have two more innerducts or another duct itself to pull our fiber through.

By having constructed like this we have really made it easy and cost effective for AboveNet to expand. The big cost in building a fiber network is the construction, so if all you have to do to expand a route is pull more fiber through an innerduct, it is infinitely cheaper than having to dig up the ground. Most of our competitors never built with that design philosophy. They put one 96 count cable in the ground and that was it.

They have no way of adding to it. Or because they were trying to squeeze it in near a utility line, they couldn’t put in a large conduit system and had to squeeze in a single fiber run with limited amounts of fiber.

Q: So that would mean that AboveNet can expand more easily?

MB: Correct. We are in more markets, we can expand more easily, and we have higher count fiber cables. But at least as important is that we have put in the latest generation fiber types in the ground. There is something called non-zero dispersion shifted fiber. This type of fiber has been designed for dense wave division multiplexing and works at the 1550 nanometer wavelength range.

Most fiber that is in the ground is called SMF-28 or just standard single mode fiber and is optimized for 1310 nanometers, which is where SONET gear operates. AboveNet has composite cables that have a combination of both the standard single mode (SMF-28) and the non-zero dispersion shifted.

Whether it is Lucent TrueWave or Corning LEAF, we have those fiber types in the ground. And they are optimized to support dense wave division multiplexing, which is what most carriers and enterprises are looking at to deploy. They want a dense wave network supporting all their applications, and not a SONET based TDM network.

When we built the routes we really tried to honeycomb the central business districts, and we built quite extensive backbones in the cities we are in. And we would build these backbones along right-of-ways that our competitors don’t have and where we could we would bury our fiber.