Now, on fibre optics, he can offer his customers a reliable link at more than twice the speed.
Professor Julian Jones of Heriot-Watt University also gets an OBE for his work on pioneering new types of fibre optics.
No sooner had the fibre optics hummed with that news than NASDAQ revealed plans to buy Instinet, another ECN, owned mainly by Reuters.
The radius of the turn is the same as the wavelength of the light used a tenth of what would be possible using fibre optics.
But experts argue that current mobile technology cannot compete with fast fixed line connections such as fibre optics which offer speeds of up to 100Mbps.
This really was the case, absolutely so, back in the days of the main network being copper rather than the fibre optics we use today for those main cables.
FORBES: British Telecom's Copper Cable is Worth More Than British Telecom
Although Teledesic says it is still confident of success, others fear that the improvement of rival technologies, such as broadband wireless and fibre optics, will leave Teledesic with little but niche markets.
Thanks to fibre-optics, it is now possible to illuminate many of the body's remotest organs and darkest orifices.
The newer upstarts are creating what amounts to an entirely new business: fibre-optics not copper, the Internet not normal telephony, dealing with customers not regulators.
In just a little over a century, you already have the discovery of penicillin, the development of fibre-optics and the foundations of the internet and fourteen Nobel Laureates to your name.
More than two full generations of Moore's law (which says that the number of transistors squeezed on to a computer chip doubles every 18 months) have passed since the tech bubble burst, as have more than three generations of fibre-optics communications technology.
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