Companies from Asia are now competing to reach the next fiber optic breakthrough, as they pour increasingly higher resources into R&D. Just recently, students and professors from South China University have developed a new UV-resistant glass material, while Japan’s Socionext Inc. and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. found success in creating a 56GB/s per channel transceiver that consumes a low amount of power unmatched by any other transceiver in existence.