At the Fiber-to-the-Home Conference on Sept. 30 - Oct. 3, Corning (GLW) is set to introduce its full suite of optical fiber, cable and hardware and equipment solutions based on its nanoStructures technology platform. On July 23rd, Corning announced the gigantic breakthrough in fiber optic technology- optical fiber cables based on nanoStructures technology that allows cabled fiber to be bent around very tight corners with virtually no signal loss. Optical fiber is superior in all aspects to traditional copper cables in transmitting everything from broadband internet, TV, and digital telephone- all aspects except maintaining the quality of the signal in bends, twists, and other abusive configurations. The reason is the light used to transmit the signal travels in a straight line. Having not been able to bend optical fiber as you could copper cable, using optical fiber in tight installations such as in apartments were not possible…leaving a large untapped market. It is unclear how Corning’s geniuses figured out how to overcome this old problem handicapping the use of fiber optic cables. The nanoStructures technology used suggests the glass composing the fiber optics have been engineered to the smallest microscopic detail such that the light transmitting the data always travels in a straight line. This is similar to how a super-closeup of the edge of a circle will look like a straight line.

However it is done, this may be one of the biggest recent breakthroughs in media communications that no one is talking about. All the major telecoms such as Verizon (VZ), AT&T (T), and Charter Communications (CHTR) as well as cable operators such as Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Comcast (CMCSA) are fighting to offer the triple play: internet, telephone, and TV. Reliable fiber optic cable that Corning just invented makes the triple play possible and easy. On July 25th, the “Bend it Like Corning” article in Fortune highlights the importance of optical fiber:

what Verizon (VZ) really loves is the material’s ability to transmit 25 trillion bits of data per second; that’s the equivalent of 400 million simultaneous phone calls, or 450 channels of high-definition television.