Internet could run out of capacity by 2010, study claims

IDG News Service - Consumer and corporate use of the Internet could overload the current capacity and lead to brown-outs in two years unless backbone providers invest billions of dollars in new infrastructure, according to a study released Monday (download PDF).

A flood of new video and other Web content could overwhelm the Internet by 2010 unless backbone providers invest up to $137 billion in new capacity, more than double what service providers plan to invest, according to the study by Nemertes Research LLC, an independent analysis firm. In North America alone, backbone investments of $42 billion to $55 billion will be needed in the next three to five years to keep up with demand, Nemertes said.

The company's research initiatives, including this study, are funded by a client base of Fortune 2,000 enterprises, vendors, service providers and nonprofit groups, including the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA), which purchased distribution rights to the research.

The IIA is a nonprofit coalition that supports universal broadband and was founded by Larry Irving and Bruce Mehlman in 2004. Irving is president and CEO of Irving Information Group, a consulting firm that advises international telecommunications and technology companies. Mehlman is co-founder of Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti Inc., a public affairs consulting firm in Washington.

The study said it is the first to "apply Moore's Law (or something very like it) to the pace of application innovation on the Net. Our findings indicate that although core fiber and switching/routing resources will scale nicely to support virtually any conceivable user demand, Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, will likely cease to be adequate for supporting demand within the next three to five years."

The study confirms long-time concerns of the IIA, said Mehlman. The IIA, whose members include AT&T Inc., Level 3 Communications Inc., Corning Inc., Americans for Tax Reform and the American Council of the Blind, has been warning of a coming "exaflood" of video and other Web content that could clog its pipes.

The study gives "good, hard, unique data" on the IIA concerns about network capacity, Mehlman said. The Nemertes study suggests that demand for Web applications such as streaming and interactive video, peer-to-peer file transfers, and music downloads will accelerate, creating a demand for more capacity. Close to three-quarters of U.S. Internet users watched an average of 158 minutes of video in May and viewed more than 8.3 billion video streams, according to research from comScore Inc.

Internet users will create 161 exabytes of new data this year, and this exaflood is a positive development for Internet users and businesses, the IIA said. An exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes, or about 1.1 billion gigabytes. One exabyte is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD-quality video.