Two years ago, MIT graduate student Yoel Fink built the "perfect mirror"-one that reflects light from all angles with negligible absorption. Now OmniGuide Communications, the Cambridge, Mass.-based startup Fink helped found, hopes to roll that perfection into cable that can carry light of higher intensity and a broader bandwidth, transmitting up to 1,000 times more data than fiber optics.

"Not too far in the future, we're going to bang into the limits" of conventional fiber optics, says MIT materials scientist Edwin Thomas, another OmniGuide founder. In addition to transmitting more data, the new cable could eliminate the need for signal boosters every 60 to 80 miles. And, unlike fiber optics, the cable would have no trouble transmitting light around sharp bends, allowing the cables to be miniaturized to the scale of the tiny optical switches being developed for the optical Internet ( see " The Microphotonics Revolution ," TR July/August 2000 ).