So, no idea the cost of O-O amplification or O-E-O these days, but it's expensive. You have to run power (usually there's power with the optics), and the bigger

So, no idea the cost of O-O amplification or O-E-O these days, but it's expensive. You have to run power (usually there's power with the optics), and the bigger problem is real estate (At least in urban areas). 100x lower signal loss would do away with most of these. For example, the MAREA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAREA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAREA) undersea cable is 6,600 km long. Current optical fiber requires repeaters every ~100km. If it's to be believed, ZBLAN could get rid of these repeaters all together. The cable's design is _much_ more complicated because of the requirement to have electricity and repeaters.