The pipes are clogging. There are 377.65 million people online worldwide, and some analysts warn that figure could increase by as much as 25 percent annually for a few years to come. Traffic could reach 10 times the current level in a few short years, and demand for bandwidth might reach as high as 200 times current demand by 2005.
Blame new users, new applications (think Napster), fatter pipes that allow us to use those applications and a new technological infrastructure that buries the Net more deeply in our lives. Imagine every appliance with its own Web address and connected to the great Net of being. Arun Netravali, president of Bell Labs, estimates that within a decade "chatter" among these machines will surpass the volume of human communication.
There are a lot of unknowables in this future, but you can rest assured of at least one thing: The current Net infrastructure is not going to cut it. Experts are already warning that the demand for bandwidth is going to outstrip supply by a factor of two in coming years.