And we can use fibre optic cable for the telephone cables and thus have more copper to use for the water pipes.
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Internet services have been boosted by an international fibre optic cable connection.
The huge machine includes 12, 000 modified versions of the processor originally designed for the Sony Playstation 3, and 92km (57 miles) of fibre optic cable, housed in 288 refrigerator-sized cases.
Campaign group A Human Right, which is supported by the UN, has called on the Department for International Development to contribute a substantial amount to the engineering costs of connecting the island to the South Atlantic Express, a new superfast fibre optic cable being laid by South African firm eFive.
MCI, WorldCom has a fibre-optic cable in America, global satellite coverage, and a mass of undersea fibre.
Work on the fibre-optic underground cable network will start immediately and be 90% complete by 2014.
Who was there to caution against the mad stampede of telecoms firms into fibre-optic cable?
Eric Bender, who is about to submit plans for the server farm, will not have to lay much fibre-optic cable.
The woman, 75, had been digging for the metal not far from the capital Tbilisi when her spade damaged the fibre-optic cable on 28 March.
The business of laying fibre-optic cable, both terrestrially and under the sea, used to be the preserve of incumbent telecoms operators sharing the burden of capital-intensive projects.
Daniel Gross, a journalist, wrote a book claiming that bubbles were good for economies since they leave behind infrastructure (canals, railways, fibre-optic cable) that can last for generations.
He listed numerous violations of security policies in recent years, including by one (unnamed) news group that installed a fibre-optic cable despite having been told repeatedly this was not allowed.
Another possibility, much discussed within the Treasury, would be a government-sponsored effort to encourage the private sector to lay state-of-the art fibre-optic cable in one or more of Britain's major cities.
But Mr McCourt's main fascination is with fibre-optic cable.
It has moved fastest in Mumbai, where it has laid 150 km of fibre-optic cable and is now offering speedy Internet access to the first of its 1.9m customers in the city.
Since 1997, Telkom has cut the time it takes to repair faults, reduced international charges by 50% in real terms, and started laying a massive undersea fibre-optic cable to carry data between Africa and Europe.
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Think along the lines of a special forces unit going deep into enemy territory with embedded geeks in the team, to dig up fibre-optic cable to be able to reach the systems that were supposed to be unreachable.
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The looming capacity crunch of the 1990s was averted not just by slower demand growth, but also dramatically increased supply, in the form of big investments in fibre-optic cable and technical tricks that squeezed more data through the pipes.
Many foreign firms, of course, are doing well in China, especially at the two extremes of the value chain: things like luxury goods, fibre-optic cable and big aeroplanes on the one hand, and oil, ores and recyclable waste on the other.
Later that year, a Wall Street contact arranged a meeting with Philip Anschutz, a reclusive tycoon who had sold Southern Pacific Railroad to Union Pacific and, in a stroke of genius, kept the right to lay fibre-optic cable along the tracks of both railways.
Yet increasingly, relatively humdrum, time-consuming tasks, which would once have been foisted on ambitious but inexperienced young recruits, working long hours to earn their spurs in Wall Street or the City of London, are, thanks to the miracle of fibre-optic cable, foisted on their lower-paid Indian counterparts.
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In many countries telecoms operators have been converting some of their last-mile connections to high-speed fibre-optic links, though cable networks and telephone wires still account for most last-mile connections.
Pirelli says it will now concentrate on cable technology and fibre-optic components, which together accounted for 19% of its sales last year, and also on telecoms services.
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NTL, recognised in the industry as the most innovative company, also has the most comprehensive infrastructure cable, mobile telephony, a national fibre-optic network and a television broadcast network.
They got more money for the copper cable they dug up than it cost them to put in fibre optic.
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