Word: opticalness
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...family members will learn that they do not carry the gene. That does not means that they are immune to colon cancer, just that they bear an average risk (a 1-in-20 chance during their lifetime). The other 25% will probably undergo a colonoscopy, in which a fiber-optic scope is used to search for growths in the colon. The $1,000 procedure would then become an annual routine...
...called Baby Bells) are trying to create their own interactive networks, either by themselves or in partnership with cable companies. Bell Atlantic is scheduled to begin offering video on demand to 300 homes in northern Virginia this summer. U.S. West has announced plans to deploy enough fiber-optic lines and coaxial cable (the pencil-thick wire used by cable systems) across 14 states to deliver "video dial tones" to 13 million households starting next year...
...entire enterprise is fiber. Fiber-optic cable, made up of hair-thin strands of glass so pure you could see through a window of it that | was 70 miles thick, is the most perfect transmitter of information ever invented. A single strand of fiber could, in theory, carry the entire nation's radio and telephone traffic and still have room for more. As it is deployed today, fiber uses less than 1% of its theoretical capacity, or bandwidth, as it's called in the trade. Even so, it can carry 250,000 times as much data as a standard copper...
...1980s, AT&T, MCI and Sprint installed fiber-optic cable between major U.S. cities to increase the capacity of their long-distance telephone lines. At about the same time, the Federal Government, spurred by Gore, leased some of these lines to give scientists a high-speed data link to supercomputers funded by the National Science Foundation. These two networks, private and public, carry the bulk of the country's telephone and data traffic. In the superhighway system of the future, they are the interstate turnpikes...
...problem comes when you get off the turnpike onto the roadways owned by local phone companies and cable-TV operators. Some of these are being converted to high-bandwidth fiber optic. But at the end of almost every local system - the "last mile" that goes from the local-service provider to the house - you run into the electronic equivalent of a bumpy country road. In the phone system, the bottleneck is that last bit of copper wiring, which seems far too narrow to admit the profusion of TV signals poised to flow through it. In cable TV, the roadblocks...