Honestly the excess fiber put in the ground back then has nothing to do with fiber capacity now. The same fiber back then that could carry 100mbs can use new transceivers that push a terabit
Honestly the excess fiber put in the ground back then has nothing to do with fiber capacity now. The same fiber back then that could carry 100mbs can use new transceivers that push a terabit
Current network capacity runs off excess fiber. Networking gets upgraded at nodes and dumb pipe (excess fiber) efficiency improves. Like we upgrade switching for 100+ year old rail to improve freight efficiency. Much of $$$$$ / capex "wasted" in dot bubble boom went to civil engineering - digging trenches to build out "agnostic" fiber conduits with multi decade life span that can be repuporsed for general use.
Bulk of AI capex build out is going to be in specialized hardware and data centers with bespoke power / cooling / networking profile. If current LLM approaches turn out to be deadend the entire data centre is potentially stranded asset unless future applications can specifically take advantage. But there's a good chance _if_ LLM crashes, then it might be due to something inherently wrong with current approach, i.e. compute/cost doesn't make commercial sense, and resuing stranded data centers might not make economic sense.