The two MCTS sites, which are nearly 200 miles apart, are connected by a fibre optic link.

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The ground control stations send their commands to Reaper via a fibre-optic link to a satellite relay station in Europe, which bounces them into space and back down to the aircraft.

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Turns out they recently installed a fiber optic link to the studio at the school and local station -- and CNN affiliate -- WWL is evacuating their operation to that studio.

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All that juice comes at the price of redundant network links, though -- which means the whole thing got taken offline last night when a homeless man threw a cigarette onto a mattress under Boston's Longfellow Bridge, starting a blaze that eventually melted the fiber-optic link between Boston and New York.

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Fibre-optic cables will link each of these dishes to a central processing area, where supercomputers will stitch their data together.

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Even the most computer-savvy students are impressed by the 40 miles of fiber optic cables that link their studies to almost every subject imaginable.

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