There's more than just the cost of fiber -- there's also the cost of locating and taxes. Any maintenance if there's cuts and the costs if you need to move the fiber for a project. I've been many times where you were, frustrated that I didn't know the dark fiber options for a potential opportunity, but you have to remind yourself don't have a *right* to know where *private* fiber is. It's not just the physical property, the lack of documentation is a competitive advantage. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Luke S. Crawford [mailto:lsc@prgmr.com] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 1:59 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc (was: att fiber, et al) <snip> I'm trying to do just that right now, actually. 55 s. market to 250 Stockton in San Jose. I dono if it's five thousand feet, but it's not twice that. The cheapest fiber pair I can rent from someone else I've found is $5K/month; the cheapest build-out I've found is $150K, so even if I'm only using one pair in that, if I can get money at anything like a reasonable interest rate, if I plan on sticking around more than 5 years it makes sense to lay new fiber. Which is weird, as this is probably one of the densest masses of existing fiber in the world, going from a 'center of the universe' data center to a minor data center. <snip> The big problem here, I think, is that it's quite difficult to figure out who has what fiber where, and even once you know who owns it, to find out who to talk to at a company that might know what 'dark fiber' is, much less know how much they might rent it to you for. I spent several hours last month on the phone with XO and I kept getting redirected to someone trying to sell me a T1. I've got other projects right now, but once I'm done with that, I'm going to be spending a bunch of time pestering the PUC and other people that might know who owns fiber between here and there. <snip> But from the amount of time it takes to just find someone at those companies that even knows what dark fiber is? I think I might be better off putting in the effort to do whatever regulatory red tape is required to own fiber in the ground. So yeah; really? in my corner of the world, the problem is the same problem you see everywhere else in this industry. Any useful information is guarded jealously. In this case, where does the fiber run? I mean, I have pretty good maps of the Santa Clara municipal fiber network; but the private networks are impossible.