This current issue of the Economist has a great story about Internet capacity. According to the article, there are some who offer a Malthusian prediction that Internet traffic will soon outpace capacity, thereby inconveniencing users and making certain countries, such as the US, less competitive. There are others, however, that point out that Internet traffic is actually expanding at a slower rate than in the past. Though bandwidth intensive traffic like video has become popular, they claim that the excess long haul capacity brought about by the dot-com bubble, and continued improvement in networking equipment, can easily handle the projected growth of Internet traffic. This in turn may have a negative impact on ISPs and equipment vendors alike, as demand lags far behind supply, dropping prices and revenues.

I thought the article was incredibly timely, given the last week’s news that uTorrent, a BitTorrent client, has decided to use UDP for file sharing versus the more conventional TCP. uTorrent’s decision may have big implications for VoIP users everywhere, and could potentially lead to the type of network choking of which the Internet doomsayers warn. The most interesting point the Economist article made was that the most susceptible portion of the network to congestion is the “last mile”. While ISPs have certainly invested in improving fiber to the home, the type of heavy peer to peer activity that file sharing applications like BitTorrent encourage could quickly overwhelm the incremental steps that ISPs have taken. Furthermore, it is difficult to predict how quickly real-time video use will grow. Streaming a video from YouTube is one thing, but real-time communication requires low delay and can be much more bandwidth intensive.

What happens from here is anyone’s guess. I am certainly no fortune teller, though I do pride myself on certain prognostications (the Minnesota Vikings will experience a monumental collapse before the NFL season is over). Perhaps the most important consideration of this debate is the need for effective voice and video processing techniques for IP communications. The more constrained bandwidth becomes, the more important it is to be able to handle delay and jitter. However, for cases in which there is plentiful bandwidth, advanced capabilities like HD video conferencing can be employed. So while there may be negative implications for many in the industry if capacity is either too constrained or too plentiful, there are still technological solutions that can at least ease the pain, if not capitalize on whatever the eventual situation may be.

Would he be worried?