What is the situation with dark fibre companies?

I live in the outer areas of Greater Manchester and after reading about other areas investing in fibre I decided to type manchester fibre in to google and out popped a company called The Loop.

This seems to be a company that has built its own 'dark fibre' network and seems to be offering its services to "telcos, network operators, businesses and others looking to grow their own networks quickly and easily".

I typed in my post code and picked out my exact street address and they said it was available to my doorstep.

I'm not a business customer, just a regular residential one. But it did make me think. Should these companies be made (or incentivised) to open up their network in some way to allow for the expanse of full fibre?

According to SamKnows my exchange (Shaw) doesn't have FTTP. But this dark fibre network of this company could in the future help to bring full fibre to this area.

What are other peoples opinions on this? We seem to focus a lot of Openreaches network, and other ISP's like gigaclear, hyperoptic. But it makes me wonder how many companies like The Loop there is? What are these companies reach? How big are their networks? etc.

There is a lot of dark fibre around.

Dark fibre will not go to your doorstep but will be delivered to a point where it could be tapped. You would need to provide the last part of the link and you would have to provide the hardware to drive the fibre. After that you need to also connect it in to a network somewhere to give you onward connectivity. For an individual the costs of this would be quite high.

There is nothing stopping other operators renting dark fibre off these people and many already will be. Essentially dark fibre is just fibre that hasn't yet been connected to anything - I suspect BT will have a lot of dark fibre of their own in the ground waiting to be lit.

I also live in the outer reaches of Greater Manchester and got the same result with my postcode. However The Loop's network map on the web page doesn't come within 3 or 4 miles of us.

Perhaps they're being generous in their post code analysis

lol.. yes I noticed that. It stops at Failsworth here and I'm a few miles away.

I wonder how they put in this dark fibre? or are they buying it off openreach?

Yep, got a couple of hundred metres of dark fibre on me tranny

In reply to a post by bowdon:

I'm not a business customer, just a regular residential one. But it did make me think. Should these companies be made (or incentivised) to open up their network in some way to allow for the expanse of full fibre?

According to SamKnows my exchange (Shaw) doesn't have FTTP. But this dark fibre network of this company could in the future help to bring full fibre to this area.

What are other peoples opinions on this? We seem to focus a lot of Openreaches network, and other ISP's like gigaclear, hyperoptic. But it makes me wonder how many companies like The Loop there is? What are these companies reach? How big are their networks? etc.

Their network is open. Anyone who wants to pay can rent use of their fibre, that's kinda the point of dark fibre. They laid the stuff and their entire business is offering the opportunity to rent the physical strands they laid.

The strands can be used for anything those who lease them want, as they would be providing the kit either end to light the fibre.

Sadly it will not do that much for the costs of FTTP to individual premises. The most expensive part is, by a mile, provisioning the connections to individual premises. This stuff would only be of value for connections deeper into networks, such as backhauling cabinets like VM's virtual hubs that deliver services to thousands of premises, or connecting data centres.