Techno Sider

Too much dependence on the Internet is fine, except that by 2010, we might be headed for an information highway traffic jam that will make life on the Internet extremely difficult.

This -- as per a newly minted study by US analyst, Nemertes Research, partly-funded by the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA) that campaigns for universal Broadband in the US.

The Nemertes report warns that by 2010, our friendly information super highway might become so clogged with data, forcing Broadband users to return to using dial-up modems.

How? Simple things like downloading Web pages will begin to take longer. Especially -- those fun videos from popular Web sites like YouTube. And, we may never get to see another Google or YouTube, thanks only to the lack of sufficient infrastructure.

The remedy, as prescribed by Nemertes, is an almost $137 billion investment in global Internet infrastructure, which happens to be double of that originally envisaged.

But the Nemertes report says in no uncertain terms that until and unless this scale of investment happens, a gridlock would develop to such an extent that it would make functioning on the Internet near-impossible.

Top-level officials at the IIA voiced the view that necessary steps must be taken to build network capacity, and potentially face Internet gridlock which might wreak havoc on Internet services.