Whereas the Rhineland cable had a trasmission capacity of about 250 simultaneous telephone calls, a single modern glas fibre, the core of which being only a few micrometres thick, copes with more than 10 million parallel telephone calls using far-infrared laser transmission.

The material load of the total line of 600 kilometres length amounts to a quantity of pure quartz sand the volume of which corresponding to less than one metre of the Rhineland cable.