The $1 million per km figure is of course complete rubbish. That's just the cost scientists have had to pay to fabricate it using the zero-g plane. There is no

The $1 million per km figure is of course complete rubbish. That's just the cost scientists have had to pay to fabricate it using the zero-g plane. There is no commercial application where the demand is that high. The best commercial application for this type of fibre is a transatlantic crossing. In these applications typically 4 to 8 fibres are used and the distance is 7000km so the total length of fibre is around 50000km. For this sort of application the fibre cost needs to come in at around the $100 million dollar mark which is just $2k per km. To create a single km of cable in ZBLAN you need about 300g of feed-stock. So the revenue per kg is around $6k. This is below the current cost of around $10k per kg cost of sending payloads to orbit.