Demand and upgrade costs to light unused fibre will help stabilize bandwidth prices, says Eric Schoonover, senior analyst at research firm TeleGeography. He said it would be a "stretch" to expect prices to increase based on the growth of video.

"I'm not sure enterprise and wholesale customers would bear an increase after so many years of precipitous declines," Schoonover says. "But I have no doubt there will be an amount of stability that hasn't been seen in a few years, at least. And really in the end it all comes from video."

Video is driving the user's experience, which is prompting providers to buy more IP transit bandwidth to handle the increase in traffic on their long-haul networks, Schoonover says. But this will not eat into fiber glut, he says.

"There's plenty of fiber in the ground for years to come," Schoonover says. "In terms of the long-haul major routes, they just have so much glass in the ground that they're just going to put lasers on either end and call it a day. Most of that fibre is capable of significant DWDM deployments of 96 wavelengths per fiber pair. So you're getting almost a terabit of data traffic per fibre pair. That's just a lot."

IGI's Rosenberg disagrees. Carriers will need to replace that embedded and unused glass with newer-generation strands, he says.

"This is what the industry has waited for since the 1960s," he says. "Once you get a mass market for video telephony, that application is going to continue to suck up capacity because whatever you gave them last week is not sufficient: I want better definition, I want better sound, I want better quality in the image.

"It will mean that the industry will begin another round of investment with a new generation of glass and a new generation of optics to be able to meet that capacity demand," he says. "Current unutilized fibre will be obsoleted by changes in technology over time."

What, then, is the legacy of all that unused fibre from the late 1990s and early 2000s?

"Telecom industry wasted US$100 billion putting down all those redundant long-haul fiber strands," says the University of Minnesota's Odlyzko. "One of the great tragedies is that if the US$100 billion could have been used instead to take fiber to the home, we would have had more than half of the households in the U.S. wired up with fibre."