• CNET News.com, Thursday, October 11, 2007 12:15 PM

In a CNET column, Michael Kleeman, a UC San Diego senior fellow, warns against the need for repairing the existing Internet infrastructure. If the information superhighway were as visible as a road system, he says "it would appear to be excellent in some places, but riddled with potholes in others; heavily congested at many times and locations; and in need of massive redesign." The problem is pure supply and demand: there's not a great enough supply of bandwidth to keep pace with the growing number of requests for large files delivered over the Internet.

For a little perspective, Kleeman presents the following numbers: a popular YouTube video downloaded 54 million times requires the same amount of network data traffic as an entire month's worth in 2000. Kleeman says it's as if everyone in America suddenly needed 10 times the amount of water--we'd be in a crisis.

We may think our broadband infrastructure works just fine, but it already lags horribly behind that of other countries. In just five years, the U.S. has dropped from 4th to 15th place in the broadband rankings table, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Fifteenth place means that future Web innovation is going to start coming from overseas--not Silicon Valley.

Read the whole story at CNET News.com »