It's 2020, and the Gernsbacks have settled into their new home. Dad is watching football on the flat-panel screen in his home theater, but he isn't satisfied with standard broadcasts. The Custom SuperView channel lets him select four current or instant-replay views from any of a dozen high-definition cameras stationed around the stadium. Mom is upstairs working, using telepresence to control a robot cleaning up a toxic waste site in New Jersey. Their teenage son is playing three-dimensional chess with a friend in Paris; a supercomputer in New York calculates the data used to show the pieces on their digital holographic displays. His sister, meanwhile, is practicing with a choir made up of people who live in a dozen cities in North and South America; a computer in Mexico City merges their voices and transmits the music back to their computers in real time, while creating an array of their faces on a single screen.

Some of this technology can be found in well-equipped laboratories today, but not in homes. Today's information superhighway lacks the bandwidth to deliver the required signals, deteriorating into a muddy footpath as it reaches your front yard. Most homes connect to the Net through modems that deliver at most 56,000 bits per second. High-end users are switching to cable modems and digital subscriber lines (DSL) that can carry a few megabits per second. That's a big leap ahead, but hardly enough to satisfy the Gernsback household: The scenario described above would demand 100 to 200 megabits per second.