The bulb can be mounted indoors, and the cables alone can wind their way to light gazebos, patios and gardens. Fiber-optic lighting in houses is brand new, so new that no one has any idea how fast the market is growing or how popular this innovation will eventually become. Among other projects, the committee will work to set standards among the different manufacturers, who now make equipment that is by and large incompatible. New advances in technology have made it easier to bunch cables together and couple them to the main light box, or illuminator. These will be the lights of the 21st-century.
Some glitches have yet to be worked out.
Foremost, lights using fiber-optic cables are costly. Then comes the cost of the cable. Cables made from thousands of strands of glass, rather than plastic, are easier to bend and carry light on longer runs than their acrylic partners. They also hold up longer, because the glass remains stable and will never discolor. Glass cables need to be custom-cut so that they have a nice crisp edge that doesn't scatter the light, but their plastic cousins can be trimmed on the jobsite.