Dave Bailey

The internet is coming under increasing strain from a growing range of sources. More people are using bandwidth-hungry applications, such as video streaming, and the size of files being downloaded is growing all the time.

Add to this a surge in image spam and probably video spam, with some miscreants in basements somewhere no doubt working on high-definition movie files, and the picture looks even bleaker. And let’s not forget Web 2.0 applications such as MySpace and Facebook, which generate massive amounts of traffic in the form of domain name service lookups.

Is the internet really in danger of grinding to a halt in the next few years? Well, there is a theory this is just a big scare story put about by the big carriers to frighten people into reducing their bandwidth usage. It’s a bit like when the water companies ask us to put a brick in our cisterns to reduce water consumption because we had a few hot days in July. I don’t know if appealing to people’s better nature will work. Indeed, there may be people out there who want the web to fail because that way carriers might be forced to upgrade it.

Recent figures from analyst Infonetics Research suggest worldwide telecom carrier capital expenditure is due to hit £111bn in 2007, up by four per cent on 2006. Global service provider revenue is also expected to grow by four per cent in 2007, up from about £600bn last year. Carriers are obviously not short of money, but rather than spend it on new infrastructure, many are looking at less capital-intensive strategies to reduce the strain, such as bandwidth shaping, for example. This is carrier-speak for putting the brakes on your broadband connection, which is unlikely to go down well with most customers.

So, do the carriers have other tricks up their sleeves? The new Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards for 40Gbit/s and 100Gbit/s transmission kit should be ratified by the end of the decade. Transmission equipment based on these standards, together with forthcoming high-performance routers from Cisco and Juniper, should keep the internet ticking along nicely. And application acceleration vendors, such as Riverbed, Blue Coat, Cisco (through their FineGround acquisition) and Juniper (through their Peribit acquisition), are easing data transmission worries at the client end.

Sheer weight of data is unlikely to be the cause of the internet’s collapse. My money is on hackers or natural disasters, such as the earthquake that took out Asia’s comms infrastructure last December. Of course, as someone who doesn’t use internet banking, my money is safe either way. Touch wood!