Will the Internet run out of capacity?

Here is yet another article proclaiming that the Internet will run out of bandwidth in two years. This article is not all that different than articles I read in 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2005. I would have to check, but I bet many of them were written around this time of year--the holiday season. Vendors save new product announcements for after the New Year, local projects slow down, and for the next six weeks or so, there is not a lot of technology news. So the writers whip out a calculator, do a little arithmetic, and proclaim that that the Internet "could" run out of bandwidth. And my dog "could" grow wings and fly.

As demand increases, companies that are making money from providing backbone connectivity have more to spend on upgrades because business keeps increasing. The good news is that fiber remains a safe bet; want to increase the capacity of your fiber network by a factor of 10? Just replace the equipment on the ends of your current network. Try that with roads, water systems, or sewer. You can't increase the capacity of roads by replacing the traffic lights, and you can't increase the capacity of a water or sewer system by replacing the pumps. But it is an easy upgrade on a fiber network.

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