City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics

Preface to the Paperback Edition
‘‘It’s not over,’’ Don Keck told me in 1995 when I interviewed him about the
development of fiber optics. The intervening years proved he was right. The
bandwidth revolution that Will Hicks foresaw has come to pass. Indeed,
the revolution has had consequences that no one expected. For the first time,
the telecommunications industry had more bandwidth than it knew what to
do with. Combined with the emergence of the World Wide Web and expansion
of the Internet, the bandwidth revolution has taken the fiber-optics world
on a roller-coaster ride that has soared to the heights of overnight wealth
and plummeted to the depths of economic ruin.
A new epilogue reflects those tumultuous times. My original story wound
down with the completion of the global fiber-optic telecommunications network
around 1990. The epilogue covers the bandwidth revolution. It starts
with the technology that opened the door, the optical amplifier, which I had
mentioned only briefly before. Then it shows the origins of the boom in optical
networks, which evolved into the telecommunications bubble that led to today’s
economic bust. The dot.com companies that grew with the Internet
started the technology stock bubble, but fiber-optic communication rode it to
the bitter end. The bold dream of a planet-spanning network wound up in
bankruptcy court.
The story of fiber optics isn’t complete without the tale of the boom, the
bubble, and the bust. I have room here to cover it only briefly. Having ridden
that particular roller coaster, I’m still a bit wobbly on my feet, trying to
understand what really happened. Telecommunications was swept up in the
economic tempest of a speculative bubble, like railroads were in the late nine-