Book excerpt: A re-working of C.D. Chaffee's previously published The Rewiring of America (Academia, 1988), this professional book describes the fiber optics revolution. There have been many changes in the fiber optics field since the book's first publication. These include advances in optical networking; the additional bandwidth created by the Internet and associated data services; liberalization of the global telecommunications industry; and the rewiring of the world's oceans with fiber optics. Building the Global Fiber Optics Superhighway details all these developments. C.D. Chaffee writes: `One thing is clear: as our networks become primarily data-driven, they need to be built differently, to be able to handle data first, but also voice. It is a different way of looking at the world.'