It is a new product dubbed OptiStar, and it looks like any other greenprinted circuit board, or ``card,'' that plugs into the innards of acomputer. But on its circuitry are some high-tech optical fibers that canzap data in and out of the machine at blinding speeds - 50 times as fast asthe hottest kind of connection available heretofore.

What good is that? Well, suggests a Lucent sales person, if you happen to bea hospital administrator with $7,995 to spare, you could use the card toshuttle massive cardiac-imaging files to eminent cardiologists around theworld, for an instant group consultation on a difficult patient, in ``amatter of seconds.''

``It sounds crazy" broadband overkill,'' acknowledges a Lucent spokesman.``But, it's not, sine in the future anyone is going to want an opticallink.'' Faster and more -- those are the catch-words of the globaltelecommunications industry these days as it plows unprecedented sums into amassive project that amounts to rebuilding much of the world's coppercommunications network with glass fibers.

An all, 198,400 kilometers a year of new optical cable is going undergroundor undersea-up from a pace of 49,600 kilometers a year in 1996, according totelecommunications-equipment company Alcatel SA of France. The hottest endof the market, for so-called dense wave-division multiplexing equipment, is$8 billion a year and growing faster than 40 per cent annually, it says.

And the pace is picking up. Telecom 99, the industry's biggest trade showhere last week, saw a blizzard of breathlessly worded announcements of yetmore optical investments. FLAG Telecom, an undersea cable operator, invitedthe world's technical news media to hear of its plans to double the size ofits next trans-Atlantic cable, to a mind-numbing capacity of 4.8 trillionbits a second, 40 times the message-carrying capacity of the previous eightoperating trans-Atlantic cables put together.

The contract to lay the cable, with Alcatel, is valued at more than $700million, according to a person familiar with the project. At the same time,Alcatel announced it is building two more cable-laying ships for $80million, and a doubling of its Paris opto-electronics equipment factory for$100 million. It is an old saw in financial markets, that the momenteverybody stampedes into an investment is the moment to get out of it -- andthere are some Cassandras who have been warning of over-building, a global``broadband glut.''

``There will be some temporary gluts in various sectors, but overall we'rein total growth mode,'' says David Isenberg, a US-based telecom consultantvisiting the trade show.

Asian Wall Street Journal