Telecom titans are spend-ing billions to wrap the globe with fiber-optic cable, threading it through the ground and under the oceans. Its capacity is almost infinite, except for a weak link: the gear it relies on for transmitting data. The problem is a kind of language barrier. Data are in electrons, the basic units of chips and computing, but fiber optics uses photons, the basic unit of light waves. This means the chip-based computers that run a fiber network— the switches and hubs and routers— must convert electrons to photons and back again before data can get to the right destination.
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