the.com/fiber optic cable

means A cable made of hair-thin glass or plastic strands that transmits data as pulses of light, allowing huge amounts of information to travel very fast over long distances.

from 'Fiber' traces back to Latin 'fibra,' meaning a thread or filament, while 'optic' comes from Greek 'optikos,' relating to sight or vision. The technology itself grew out of 19th and 20th-century experiments showing light could be guided along a curved stream of water or a glass rod via total internal reflection — light bouncing along inside a material rather than escaping it. Practical glass fiber for communication became possible only once engineers in the 1960s and 70s figured out how to make glass pure enough that light could travel miles through it without fading out, turning a physics curiosity into the backbone of the modern internet.