  In principle, a network can transfer data at nearly the speed of light.
Today's Internet, however, is much slower: our measurements show that latencies
are typically more than one, and often more than two orders of magnitude larger
than the lower bound implied by the speed of light. Closing this gap would not
only add value to today's Internet applications, but might also open the door
to exciting new applications. Thus, we propose a grand challenge for the
networking research community: building a speed-of-light Internet. Towards
addressing this goal, we begin by investigating the causes of latency inflation
in the Internet across the network stack. Our analysis reveals that while
protocol overheads, which have dominated the community's attention, are indeed
important, infrastructural inefficiencies are a significant and under-explored
problem. Thus, we propose a radical, yet surprisingly low-cost approach to
mitigating latency inflation at the lowest layers and building a nearly
speed-of-light Internet infrastructure.
