As part of the White House effort, a new public-private partnership, the US Ignite Partnership, was created and charged with spurring development of advanced applications for gigabit networks.

Ignite CTO Glenn Ricart said high speed networks would open the doors to a range of new applications and cost tradeoffs. In the latter case, SETI-type networks that use thousands of home and business PCs to run calculations during idle periods may be expanded.

Video conferencing may also be a big beneficiary, said Ricart. Today, users need expensive equipment to compress video signals, machines that wouldn't be needed with gigabits channels, he said.

Gigabit networks can differ substantially via software-defined network and virtualization, said Ricart. A user can configure a network in much the same way they configure a virtual server, defining the speed of the network and latency.

For instance, healthcare applications could be dynamically customized, particularly for remote medicine, which would be "very interesting and enable a lot of new applications," he said.