• The Economist, Wednesday, January 2, 2008 11 AM

The Economist peers into its crystal ball and sees a significant slowdown for the Web in 2008. Not necessarily an economic slowdown--although the paper forecasts that for the greater economy--but a slowdown in the actual speed of the Internet. Such an occurrence would undermine all those reports of a 20 percent uptick in Web sending as a slower Internet means fewer pages viewed, less time spent per page, and less time spent surfing the Web.

The biggest culprit, according to the report, is spam, which accounts for 90 percent of traffic on the Web. Meanwhile, Web 2.0 services like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and peer-to-peer file sharing services are demanding more bandwidth as consumers use them more often. Add to the mix the inevitability of television on the Internet one day reaching critical mass, and we have a serious problem. Moreover, Internet access on cell phones and other mobile devices is becoming compulsory, which means each person is spending increasingly more time online.

"The result is a gridlock," the report says. "That the telephone companies are running out of bandwidth can be seen from their equipment orders." Thankfully, ISPs like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast understand the race against time and are working on much-needed backbone upgrades, only it will take a few years for improvements to show.

Read the whole story at The Economist »