  Recently, there has been growing interest in employing condensed matter
systems such as quantum spin or harmonic chains as quantum channels for short
distance communication. Many properties of such chains are determined by the
spectral gap between their ground and excited states. In particular this gap
vanishes at critical points of quantum phase transitions. In this article we
study the relation between the transfer speed and quality of such a system and
the size of its spectral gap. We find that the transfer is almost perfect but
slow for large spectral gaps and fast but rather inefficient for small gaps.
