News Slowing the speed of light to improve networking

A case of less haste, more speed? This from news.com:

Researchers at UC Berkeley, along with scientists from the University of Oregon and the University of Illinois, say they can slow the speed of light in a way that could help speed the delivery of movies to your PC.

Scientists at the university managed to slow the speed of light traveling through a semiconductor to 6 miles a second, or 31,000 times slower than the 186,000 miles per second that light normally travels in a vacuum.

Slowing the light pulses could lead to a more orderly traffic flow in networks, which in turn could lead to faster transmission of more or larger files. Potentially, this could mean high-resolution videoconferencing without the jitter, or collaboration on complex 3D files between two engineers on different sides of the globe.

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