We work in a young industry: in just 50 years, fibre capacity has increased astronomically. The theoretical has become practical with astonishing regularity. But for all the advance in speed there remains one weak link: contamination on fibre end faces. In the ‘good old days’ of megabits per second, a contaminated end face was not much of a concern. Today, insertion loss and reflectance problems are major concerns as speeds jump from gigabits-per-second to terabits and beyond.