alt Hacker NewsThe 2001 telecoms crash drove benefits for companies that came later in the availability of inexpensive dark fiber after the bubble popped. WorldCom, ICG, Williams sold off to Verizon, Level 3, Teleglobe, and others. That in turn helped future Internet companies gain access to plentiful and inexpensive bandwidth. Cable telephony companies such as Cablevision Systems, Comcast, Cox Communications, and Time Warner, used the existing coaxial connections into the home to launch voice services.
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epistasis • today at 6:54 PM
This is indeed true, but doesn't fiber have a far longer lifetime than GPU heavy data centers? The major cost center is the hardware, which has a fairly short shelf life.
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Rail and fiber deprecates on multiple decade timescales. AI data centers close to tulips. Even assuming we manage to make data center stretch to 10 years, these assets won't be around long enough to support ecosystem of new companies if the economics stops making sense. Ultimately the only durable thing is any power infra that gets built, vs rail and fiber where inheritance isn't just rail networks or fiber but like 1000s of kilometers of earthwork projects to build out massive physical networks.