London ---- A new report by BroadGroup reveals new opportunities for dark fibre have increased significantly driven by new demand, relatively few pan European providers and regulatory pressure.
Reviewing the market, Dark Fibre Europe 3, reports on the dispersed nature of dark fibre networks across the region where traditional academic network usage has been overtaken by demand from new players such as data centre operators and mobile networks.
With few pan-European operators providing dark fibre services, and current services provided by a fragmented market of smaller telecoms providers and regional providers, the report evidences increased activity in network acquisition by current players, new entrants and private equity firms who perceive a bigger value opportunity.
Technology is changing the both the capacity and value of the dark fibre opportunity. Backbone speed per fibre is increasing over time ? currently at 100 Gbps in practice ? with future speeds potentially being as high as multiple terabytes.
As acquisitions increase in pace which brings greater pricing stability, early evidence of online trading of dark fibre resources is identified in the report which combined with emerging cloud brokerage services could coalesce into a powerful proposition enabling faster availability, transactions and costing.
The report includes a detailed survey of 46 end users across a number of verticals, and details their experience of dark fibre supply and pricing.
The report also identifies developments in several Tier 2 metro markets where dark fibre deployments have taken place, cites deployments between Data Centre facilities, the business models used and developments in the pricing structure and contract terms of Dark Fibre services.
A marked contrast remains between Europe where much of the fibre remains under Telco ownership and the USA where well-funded local specialists thrive. This means that outside of the Nordics, the choice of Dark Fibre providers for the user are still limited. It remains to be seen whether private investment can change this market even further.
A preview of some of the findings will be provided in a dark fibre workshop taking place at Datacloud Europe in Monaco 3-4 June.