Direct fiber: Fiber that leaves the central

Direct fiber: Fiber that leaves the central office and is attached directly to one customer. This provides the greatest bandwidth, but direct fiber is expensive.

Shared fiber: Similar to direct fiber except that as the fiber approaches the premises of nearby customers, it splits into other optical fibers for those users.
What Is Dark Fiber?

The term dark fiber (often spelled dark fibre or called unlit fibre) most commonly refers to installed fiber optic cabling that is not currently in use. The term sometimes also refers to privately operated fiber installations.
cfot salary
Trends like cloud computing, edge computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are increasing enterprise connectivity needs. That’s driving a growing number of organizations to investigate dark fiber as an alternative to commercial Internet service.

To find out more about this trend, Network Computing recently spoke with Robert Coenen, vice president of business development for InterOptic, a vendor specializing in data interconnect solutions.

Coenen began by explaining that the term "dark fiber" refers to fiber optic cable that has been laid in the ground but isn't being used. “Whenever somebody buries a fiberoptic cable, most of the cost is in getting that cable into the ground,” explained Coenen. “Something like less than 10 percent of the cost of such a project is actually the fiberoptic cable. So, what they do is bury as many actual fibers as possible.” In many cases, less than half of the actual cables underground are being used, leaving the rest available for companies to lease.