This peice was informative.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7557280.stmA huge increase in the speed of the internet could be produced by slowing parts of it down, say researchers.
Applying the brakes could be the "metamaterials" that may make it possible to create invisibility cloaks.
The net's speed limit comes about not in transporting information, but in routing it to its various destinations.
Metamaterials could replace the bulky and slow electronics that do the routing, paving the way for lightning fast speeds.
It limits the speed of the whole process to the speed of your electronics," says Dr Chris Stevens from the department of engineering sciences at the University of Oxford.
"The light and the fibres can quite cheerfully sustain a couple of terahertz, but your electronics can't do more than a few gigahertz."
It is at this point that the metamaterials come prove most useful. If the light signals could be slowed sufficiently during the switching process, there would be no need for the electrical conversion step.
This problem has been with us since the early days of fibre optic usage and regardless of the hype about meta materials the facts are that we the consumer do not have either the infrastructure or the need for handling such speeds, shifting the "slow" electronics from the fibre backbone to the home will make no difference, nicely glossed over here is the simple fact we have to convert the light back into something our "electronic" computers can utilise, anyone suggesting this is not the case should be looked at with a wary eye.
