Internet will brown out in two years

ISPs and telcos have no backbone

The World Wide Web will slow to a crawl in two years unless ISPs and telcos start investing in infrastructure, someone reckons.

Macworld quotes a study by the Nemertes Research Group, which reckons that a flood of video and other web content is going to flood the Interweb by 2010.

Unless telcos invest about $137 billion in new capacity then everything will go brown and your broadband will slow to modem speed, the report warned.

The telcos are planning investments in infrastructure, but the report says that they only want to spend about half of what they need.

In the US backbone investments of $42 billion to $55 billion will be needed, Nemertes said.

Nemertes came up with its figures by applying something that is a bit like Moore's Law to the pace of internet software development and dividing by its shoe size.

Although core fibre and switching/routing resources scale nicely, Internet access infrastructure, especially in America, is pretty wobbly.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/11/20/internet-brown-outs-two-years