The recent pandemic has triggered a social revolution hinged on communication technologies (ICTs), leading to the umpteenth step of digitalizing our existence. In industrialized countries, the digital divide has been almost overcome, providing to almost every citizen high-speed access to the internet. Such huge data transport capacity enabled to move towards a new paradigm, where computation is localized in data centers, performing all the processing behind the services, accessible by the users through low-cost terminals. From the perspective of ICT engineers, this moved the research and development interest from long-haul communications, usually based on high-power lasers or transmitting information through external modulators, to short-range optical links.