By the end of this year, Lucent Technologies of New Jersey, USA, says that its optical fibres will be able to carry up to a jaw-dropping 400 billion bits of data per second. Although laboratory tests have produced similar, high-capacity optical fibres earlier, this is over five times the throughput of the best commercial system currently available. Lucent's former parent, the multinational telephone giant, AT&T, will be the first customer to use this new technology ( New Scientist , Vol 157, No 2120).