Imagine building a network bigger and faster than AOL in just five days. At the Dallas Convention Center they're stringing 75 miles of fiber optic cable at the Super Computing 2000 Convention. By Tuesday, some of the fastest computers in the world, brought in for the show, will be linked to each other and the outside world. The backbone of it all is fiber optic cable. Fiber optic cable is basically a pipe made to carry light.
Light can carry billions of times more data than traditional copper wire.
Fiber optic cable is made of glass. A light shining in one end bounces off the sides of the cable and reaches the other end unimpaired. Driving light is what it's all about. In that sense the network here is similar to those going in all over the world. The blinking red light shows light going out of the communications center.