A team of Stanford electrical engineers has discovered how to modulate, or switch on and off, a beam of laser light up to a 100 billion times a second with materials that are widely used in the semiconductor industry.

Stanford does it again, this time finding a way to modulate (shutter) lasers at 100Gbit/s using germanium and silicon.

Give it about five years and we'll have fiber lines running that fast. Current DWDM implementations allow approximately 100Gbit/s per carrier (channels are 200GHz wide, every 20nm from 1300 - 1500 nm).