From the Toronto Star:
Rising demand for bandwidth-hogging Internet activities such as swapping music files and watching YouTube videos threatens to outstrip the Web’s infrastructure within three years, creating the spectre of service “brownouts” and potentially thwarting the development of the next Google-sized application, an industry-funded study warns.
Despite all the talk about the Internet’s infinite possibilities, a study by U.S. firm Nemertes Research found that projected increases in Internet traffic are poised to eclipse the capacity of the Web’s broadband access infrastructure – essentially the points where users “plug in” to the Internet via cable, phone or fibre optic lines –as early as 2010.