This is essentially the same operation as splicing terrestrial fiber optic cables; after the cladding is stripped off, the ends of the glass fiber are cleaved cleanly and positioned in the jaws of ...

and explains the design decisions he’s made — from splicing fiber optics himself, to building a PC to do routing instead of getting a hardware Small Form-factor Pluggable (SFP) equipped router.

Fiber is also used to replace copper cable for LAN backbones. An optical fiber is constructed of a transparent core made of nearly pure silicon dioxide (SiO2), through which the light travels.