For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games. Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.In a widely cited report published last November, a research firm projected that user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011. The title of a debate scheduled next month at a technology conference in Boston sums up the angst: “The End of the Internet?”But the Internet traffic surge represents more a looming challenge than an impending catastrophe. Even those most concerned are not predicting a lights-out Internet crash. An individual user, they say, would experience Internet clogging in the form of sluggish download speeds and frustration with data-heavy services that become much less useful or enjoyable.“The Internet doesn’t collapse, but there would be a growing class of stuff you just can’t do online,” said Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research, which predicted the bandwidth squeeze by 2011, anticipating that demand will grow by 100 per cent or more a year.Others are less worried — at least in the short term. Andrew M Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota, estimates that digital traffic on the global network is growing about 50 per cent a year, in line with a recent analysis by Cisco Systems, the big network equipment maker.That sounds like a daunting rate of growth. Yet the technology for handling Internet traffic is advancing at an impressive pace as well. The router computers for relaying data get faster, fiber optic transmission gets better and software for juggling data packets gets smarter.“The 50 per cent growth is high. It’s huge, but it basically corresponds to the improvements that technology is giving us,” said Professor Odlyzko, a former AT&T Labs researcher. Demand is not likely to overwhelm the Internet, he said.While experts debate the immediacy of the challenge, they agree that it points to a larger issue. In the Internet era, they say, high-speed networks are increasingly the economic and scientific petri dishes of innovation, spawning new businesses, markets and jobs. If American investment lags behind, they warn, the nation risks losing competitiveness to countries that are making the move to higher-speed Internet access a priority.“The long-term issue is where innovation happens,” Professor Odlyzko said. “Where will the next Google, YouTube, eBay or Amazon come from?”The Internet, though a global network, is in many ways surprisingly local. It is a vast amalgam of smaller networks, all linked together.
