A better word for non-quantum-physicists would be "transport" here. It's very difficult to move quantum bits from one place to another at all. The light beam is

A better word for non-quantum-physicists would be "transport" here. It's very difficult to move quantum bits from one place to another at all. The light beam is used to increase the reliability of that process. This doesn't affect how -classical- information is transmitted or make it any better. It makes -quantum- information transmission reliable, which is actually pretty significant. This should allow for quantum computers of larger sizes than the super-tiny ones that have been created so far to actually work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-teleportation_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-teleportation_theorem (why it is difficult to transmit quantum information) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation (what is being done in this experiment) What the breakthrough is is a way to do quantum telportation reliably -and- quickly (which had both been done before)