content: Here is an example of the gross amounts of Dark Fiber that is available in a city near me . My friend worked for the school district when they put in the fiber: The school district (I worked at) owns a shitload of dark fiber that is already spread out across the city in a 50 mile radius.  Problem is that, because it was taxpayer funded, it cannot be used for commercial purposes.  So there are thousands of gigabits worth of fiber sitting in the ground, but they aren't allowed to let the public use it unless it was free to the taxpayers (since they already paid for the fiber in the first place) Nobody will want to pony up the dough to light the fiber up if they can't charge for it so the spine is there collecting dust, with no nerves connected to anything  to give you an idea of how much potential it has:  we core-drilled and installed TWO fiber conduits to every school in the district, and in the conduit installed 144-strand cables.  To provide a whopping redundant 20-gigabit pair of connections to each school, we only needed 4 strands.  so every part of city, including two adjacent towns, have 142 dark strands running through town. 710 gigabit capacity, collecting dust, or 1420 gig if you take away the redundant pair