A customer survey sent out March 14 to AT&T’s U-verse subscribers asked whether they would be interested in signing up for, or even inquiring about, a “new video and Internet service” that would: Stream to customers’ own devices without a receiver box; include local broadcast channels and “popular sports and entertainment” cable channels; the option to bundle one streaming service such as Netflix or Amazon Prime; and better picture quality and shorter wait times for streaming, All this would be offered “at a significantly lower price than traditional pay TV services” and without usage charges for streaming.

"We are putting a lot of thought into the design of Glass because new technologies always raise new issues," a Google spokesperson wrote to Ars. "We actually believe there is tremendous potential to improve safety on our roads and reduce accidents. As always, feedback is welcome."

The researchers overcame these issues by fundamentally improving the hollow core design, using an ultra-thin photonic-bandgap rim. This new design enables low loss (3.5 dB/km), wide bandwidth (160nm), and latency that blows the doors off normal optic fiber — light, and thus the data, really is travelling 31% faster down this new hollow fiber. To achieve the transmission rate of 73.7 terabits per second, the researchers used wave division multiplexing (WDM) to transmit 37 40-gigabit signals down the hollow fiber.