Study: Bandwidth consumption could cripple Internet

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By Stevie Smith Nov 22, 2007, 8:54 GMT

According to potentially worrying figures released by research company Nemertes, growth related to the Internet could see everyone’s favourite flowing information superhighway jammed across all lanes by the year 2010. A new study shows that the Internet could slow to a crawl by 2010 if infrastructure investment is not boosted by $137 billion USD. Credit: Wikipedia.org.

A new study shows that the Internet could slow to a crawl by 2010 if infrastructure investment is not boosted by $137 billion USD. Credit: Wikipedia.org.Basing its conclusions on current consumer demand for bandwidth, Nemertes has offered that networks are likely to experience severe slowdown as they literally sag beneath the sheer weight of data being carried upon them. In order to feasibly avoid such an outcome over the next two years, the Nemertes report outlines that around $137 billion USD will need to be spent applying worldwide upgrades to current broadband networks in order to provide solid foundations for an ever-increasing demand. The report suggest that, if the problem is not addressed promptly, the current high-speed access being enjoyed by increasing numbers of users (which is significantly contributing to the advancing network strain) could be swiftly replaced by something similar to the trawling frustration of dial-up connectivity."It may take more than one attempt to confirm an online purchase or it may take longer to download the latest video from YouTube," warns the report. And it’s not just user experience that could be in the firing line, with Nemertes suggesting that "the next Amazon, Google, or YouTube" enterprise venture would also likely fail to arise due to "insufficient infrastructure preventing applications and companies merging."A BBC News article points to Internet usage figures (comScore) for the month of May, which show that online demand for applications reliant on heavy bandwidth are still on the increase. According to researchers at comScore, almost 75 percent of Internet users in the U.S. consumed 158 minutes of online video during may, and watched in excess of 8.3 billion video streams."We must take the necessary steps to build out network capacity or potentially face internet gridlock that could wreak havoc on internet services," said Larry Irving, co-chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA), which co-funded Nemertes’ report.

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techNov 22nd, 2007 - 14:47:19

Time for Gaiacomm International 4G terahertz network!

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