"Leaving Britain at night headed for Holland in a British Airways Boeing 757, I was captivated by their plan. I relished the esthetics of new integrated circuitry that could attach every computer to the web photonicly at gigabits per second, ultimately for a few score dollars apience, the price of an Ethernet NIC. I looked down from the plane at the motorways surrounding London, scintillating webs of golden light, streaming with a heavy traffic of automobiles, sparkling like so many IP packets riding directly on the hard clad silicon loops and I let myself imagine that Bookham had done it, brought the light down every British street, linked every Oxfordshire Lane in endless trunks and branches, hubs and roundabouts, brocaded across the British nocturnal landscape like gilded and luminous lace in the moonlight."

[from Telecosm by George Gilder, 2000]