The massive innovation to 21st century culture has been the "social networking" idea that anybody can, and should, be a "publisher" of his content to potentially anybody and everybody in the whole world. That is actually scary for politicians, but has been the main reason that the cell phone-radio towers are nearly at their practical capacity limits, at reasonable prices. It can only get worse. Terrestrially, Local Area Networks (LANs) have embraced a data-bus architecture to transfer files/packets from many devices to many other devices through routers and data switches, and hence the total carrier capacities must now run at a rate of billion bits per second (GIGABIT).

However, now that we have millions of security cameras that can capture very high definition images, and every person in every home can now have multiple devices running that are basically dedicated high speed nano-computers (such as multi-player game consoles), sharing a common electronic signal path on a bunch of copper wires at the GIGABIT rate is already not enough. The short term solution has been to push to its limits the signal "compression" technology to permit many high definition (resolution) programs to be on line simultaneously. That trend is soon going to be complicated by the fact that the 21st century development of electronic imaging is now at many millions of pixels, and is soon to be complicated by the adoption of 3D imaging techniques. The latest imaging technologies have a real problem with the size and costs of the data "pipes."

Future growth in GIGABITS has obviously come into popular use via optical fiber signaling. Specialized single-Mode optical fibers can send very few photons, very long distances, in several different colors (frequencies) in both directions simultaneously. The first place for these very high transfer speeds is obviously super computers which are really massive integrations of many computers within a single room. BUT given the speed of light, the latest computer architectures now permit many computer servers spread over great distances to work on a single problem whose complexity needs nearly infinite processing speeds for timely results. Such computational loads were first used for the modeling of atomic bomb simulations and world-wide climate predictions. Today, this thinking is at the core of all breakthroughs hoped for at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. There they hope to calculate the exact conditions present at the BIG-BANG moment of creation. To do so, no single computer in the world is fast enough, large enough, with sufficient data storage given the amount of critical data that their experiments will generate in the flash of a nuclear explosion. BUT, according to GIGMEDIA CONSULTING research, the REAL future of such processing will be the total automation of entire transportation systems, especially aircraft.

The REAL breakthrough for GIGABIT capacities of anything will come as medical technology totally embraces the integration of: imaging, computing, communicating, and data "mining" to do what pills and surgery once did. Next to the operating room or the proton radiation treatment room will be computing powers that will model, in real time, living systems and complex DNA manipulations. Today, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is used primarily for occasional pre-treatment diagnostics. With the development of smaller cheaper magnetic field generators, looking at soft, wiggling internal organs in very high detail, in real time, as an active part of corrective treatments is certainly to come on stream this century.

Genetic "engineering," on a patient-by-patient basis, will be the practical solution to cancer-like, and genetic-predisposition-oriented disease avoidance (rather than illness treatment). That is, this century will most likely see sophisticated very aggressive treatment of everybody BEFORE they get sick. Add into that environment, the cloning and storage of body parts for replacement will be made possible by 21st century bio-computing techniques in which "data" concerning a specific organ would be captured, and the framework for a replacement will be computationally designed and used to fabricate a nearly identical, but disease free structure upon which can be built a replacement organ. Today this is bleeding-edge research. This century it will be operating at a clinic in town. Access at local hospitals to billions of gigabytes of patient data will be common, and passed around on local fiber channels. The real kicker near the end of this century will be the absolute safety of remote medical procedures which will include automated surgical machines operated remotely by expert doctors. The efficiency of new health care technology based on gigabytes and gigabits will make possible the economic treatment of the world's gigabodies.