The Great Internet Crash, or Not

What if the massive adoption and use of the internet overwhelms its capacity and takes it down? That's the question analyzed in a story in today's WSJ.

There are solid arguments on both sides. On one side are the doomsayers. They contend that the rapid increase in Internet usage lead by video streaming, file sharing, internet phone service and more could bring the internet to its knees.

"One of the key possibilities for 2007 is that the Internet could be approaching its capacity," analysts at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu wrote in a January report. "Our belief is we'll start to see some brownouts or service slowdowns or service issues," says Phil Asmundson, the national managing partner leading Deloitte & Touche USA's Telecommunications practice.

On the other side is Google and others who say that innovation will make it possible to expand bandwidth and keep data flowing freely and efficiently.

Eve Griliches, telecom analyst at research firm IDC, told the Journal that five years ago analysts and engineers voiced concerns, but the result was a surge of innovation. "It feels like we are hyping again," she says. "When we did this before, we found intelligent ways to handle problems with bandwidth."

The internet is the latest public utility. Like water and electricity, we take it for granted. But like water and electricity, the supply of internet bandwidth is not unlimited. Water shortages are now common in California, Nevada, the mountain states, the Northwest, Greece and Australia. And blackouts are no longer few and far between. They are a way of life in much of the country.

It is not out of the question any longer to see similar "shortages" in the internet in the next 18 months. The internet has moved from communication vehicle (email) to entertainment delivery system (video and audio). And 40 hours of high-definition video represent as much traffic as one million email messages. While the technology will get better as companies innovate, bandwidth is added and switches and routers are smarter and more efficient, the crush from users worldwide may be too much to handle.

I don't think the internet will be taken down for good, ever. There's just too much riding on it -- media, banking, communication, health and much more. But imagine your life without the internet for a second.

I, for one, would be out of a job. I guess I'd need to call up Mort Kondracke and see if he'd take me back at Roll Call in Washington, DC. This is a potential job I gave up to pursue my entrepreneurial seizures at U-Wire/Student Advantage. My primary communication device would go down. The living and breathing public diary of my life and kids -- this web site -- would go away. I'd need to get new phone service as Vonage would no longer work. And I'd need to subscribe to magazines and newspapers again.

The interesting sidebar to this story is the Internet2 project. Internet2 is a non-profit consortium lead by 200+ universities and about 60 companies that has created a private network called Abilene. Abilene is used for education and research and is technically seperate from the public internet network. So as the network we know as the public internet turns into the Jersey turnpike at 6 p.m. on a summer Friday, Abilene continues to carry traffic. Does the Internet2 consortium then open up Abilene? Does the US government take over (hope not ... just look at Amtrak, the public school system, Iraq or the budget deficit)?

I don't pretend to know the answer to the question posed above. But instead of sitting around idly like we did with global warming, water supply, power plant construction and a host of other issues, we should address this issue. The internet is just too valuable a public utility to let decay.