They're all still down there, out of sight and all but out of mind -- hundreds of millions of miles of hair-thin strands of glass, uniquely strung beneath the streets of every city, under our homes, suburbs, deserts, and strewn across the ocean floor. It's enough optical fibre to wrap around the earth 4,000 times (scary statistics), with each strand capable of blasting library stacks of information across the globe at the speed of light. And almost all of it sits empty, dark and idle -- an unseen monument to every unfulfilled promise of the Internet. A statistical reality people can't even begin to comprehend.
