• Boston Globe, Wednesday, December 26, 2007 11:45 AM

If Web video--still in the nascent stages of development--is "rapidly becoming the most popular thing we do online," but Web capacity is filling up at the same time, then the Internet is going to become clogged someday soon, says the Boston Globe's Elaine C. Kamarck. If we don't invest in unclogging it, that is. Imagine: "It could take forever for your photos or video to download or for your e-mail to arrive."

Whereas text doesn't take up very much bandwidth, music, video and voice over Internet technologies--which are only beginning to catch on with mainstream consumers--do. As The Wall Street Journal reports, 100 million video streams a day on YouTube consume as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in the year 2000!

How do we circumvent pending crisis? "The backbone of the Internet will need to grow," Kamarck says--which means that expensive fiber-optic cable, over which more data can travel, will have to be laid. Of course, it would fall on the big telecoms to do this--the very same companies that are spending billions on building their wireless networks. It would be one thing if demand rose as supply depleted, but for Internet service providers, the Web is a flat-fee business. We pay one fee regardless of how much bandwidth we use. And we will continue to do so until we hit that pivotal turning point. As Kamarck warns, "either the flat-rate pricing models have to end so that there can be more investment, or the Internet will slow to a crawl."

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