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Commentary

Nature Photonics 1, 133–135 (1 March 2007) | doi:10.1038/nphoton.2007.6

Riding the light towards new science

Larry Smarr

In the United States, broadband Internet to the home offers consumers a few megabits per second of bandwidth, yet gigabit-per-second Ethernet, with hundreds of times the bandwidth, is now the standard on personal and desktop computers. Therefore we have a 'broadband gap', which effectively throttles anything but nearby computing and storage devices from sending large amounts of data to each other.