Comment by khuey
6 months ago
> I believe until very recently there was so much fibre laid during the dot com boom, that we didn't really need to lay much more.
My understanding is that there was a one-two punch of the dot com boom laying a huge amount of fiber followed by wave division multiplexing shortly afterwards massively increasing the capacity of existing fiber that resulted in an oversupply that lasted a decade or more.
Wave Division Multiplexing being substantially enabled by all-optical amplifiers in the late 1990's it seems, because otherwise you have to convert optical to electrical signal, amplifiy that, and reconvert that back into an optical signal in order to travel down the next length of fiber-optic.
With optical amplifiers you can amplifiy every color of the rainbow at once, without breaking the chain.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier