The information superhighway owes its very existence to fibre optics.

With a very thin tube, light and some engineering know-how you have the components for speeding information around the world.

The communication revolution was set in motion 40 years ago, when a landmark paper was revealed to the engineering community.

In 1966, Dr Charles Kuen Kao and George Hockham, both young research engineers from the Standard Telecommunications Laboratories, addressed a meeting at the Institute of Electrical Engineers in London with their exciting new findings on the possibilities of optical fibres.

Optical fibres are transparent rods of glass or plastic stretched until they are extremely long, flexible and thinner than a human hair.