PORTLAND, Oregon (AP) -- More than 140,000 miles of fiber-optic cable lie buried along Oregon's Interstate 5 corridor, the remains of a latter-day gold rush to capitalize on a 1990's telecommunications boom.
Now, after $1 billion of investment, about 95 percent of the fiber goes unused and nearly half the companies that laid the line are bankrupt.
Dozens of companies invested billions in fiber-optic networks, the hair-thin strands of glass that carry pulses of light that translate into huge volumes of e-mail messages, Web pages and online video.
One or two fiber-optic lines, however, would have been more than sufficient to meet consumer demand. Of the 33 companies that laid fiber in Portland, 14 have filed bankruptcy, and their investors are unlikely to ever earn any of their money back.
"It was very much like the gold rush," said John Walker, an economic historian at Portland State University. "For any one of them, it makes sense to build the fiber. For all of them to build separate fiber, it doesn't."
The fiber-optic building boom was particularly frenzied in Oregon, the most direct path to run fiber between two high-tech centers — Silicon Valley and Seattle. And telecom carriers also use Oregon to connect their U.S. networks to undersea cable from Asia.
The shakeout from these failed investments partially explains Oregon's deep economic problems. Not only did the fiber carriers slash thousands of jobs in the state, but thousands more were cut at the area's numerous equipment makers such as Tektronix and now-defunct Oresis Communications.
The jobs and money are gone, but the high-tech fiber remains.
Ten long-distance fiber-optic routes run through the state, usually with two or more companies each stringing dozens of strands of fiber within the same piece of conduit, according to The Oregonian's review of data from government agencies and telecom companies.
Even applying conservative estimates to costs of construction, the companies spent more than $570 million laying long-distance fiber cables across Oregon, and they shelled out at least $265 million more equipping the 5% of fiber that is used.
Then they spent more than $170 million more digging up Portland streets to connect mainly downtown businesses.
If they need the remaining 95 percent of the fiber in the future, companies will have to spend tens of billions of dollars more to make it usable by placing lasers and amplifiers on the route.
"You feel everybody involved either knew or should have known the spectacular risks that were taken," said Reed Hundt, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from 1993 to 1997 and now a senior adviser at the high-profile business consulting firm McKinsey & Company.
But in much of Oregon, it's difficult to take advantage of the long-haul fiber, because local connections are either unavailable or too expensive.
Outside of the Portland, Salem and Eugene areas, it's rare to find much competition for local broadband connections, creating high monopoly pricing that reduces the number of services sold.
"In many communities, the connections aren't there," said John Irwin, chairman of the Oregon Telecommunications Coordinating Council, which has proposed legislation to increase broadband availability in rural parts of the state. "In other communities it's there, but it's so expensive that businesses and consumers can't afford it."