Unless the network infrastructure of the internet is
upgraded, users will experience slower and unreliable connections
by next year.
Growing demand for multimedia content and a growing number of
internet users will put pressure on outdated networks and could
cause serious problems for businesses.
Websites such as YouTube and the BBC's iPlayer, which use a lot
of bandwidth, will make the internet unreliable, new research
claims.
According to a
report in the Sunday Times, US think-tank Nemertes said as
demand for bandwidth potentially doubles, computers will regularly
start freezing and dropping offline as early as next year.
Nemertes said the growing number of people working from home
will also contribute significantly to the increased demand for
bandwidth.
Ted Ritter, an analyst at Nemertes, told the Sunday Times that
the internet, without network upgrades, will no longer be reliable
enough for business users. "For business purposes, such as
delivering medical records between hospitals in real time, it is
useless."
The internet will become merely an "unreliable toy," he
added.
He said disruption will start next year. At first, computers
will jitter and freeze. This will be followed by what he describes
as "brownouts"- the combination of computers freezing temporarily
and being reduced to a slow speed.
According to website Internet World Stats,
internet
users totalled almost 1.6 billion in March this year, compared
with about 361 million at the end of 2000. There was a 342%
increase between 2000 and 2008, and over 23% of the world
population now uses the internet.
The
Digital Britain interim report, which was published by
communications minister Stephen Carter in January, proposes 22
action points to achieve five main goals, including upgrading and
modernising the UK's digital networks.
Ismail Ismail, director at Webcredible, which monitors web
performance, said, "The problem is that the infrastructure of the
web was developed long before sites like BBC iPlayer and YouTube
existed and bandwidth is now being eaten up faster than was
imagined."
He said Lord Carter's Digital Britain agenda, which aims to get
broadband to everyone in the UK by 2012, will make the problem
worse.
"If businesses suffer downtime problems and a slow connection,
all the good work done by these companies could be undone by
something they have no control over, with their previous investment
in user experience severely undermined by the lack of
bandwidth."