'Growing traffic will not lead to Internet collapse'

Bangalore: Despite claims made by some service providers that the Internet is going to tumble down because of the overload of contents, reports say that the possibility of internet collapse could be reduced with the help of technological advances.

As per a report in BusinessWeek, researchers at the University of Minnesota have released data showing that traffic growth is actually slowing down. "In spite of the widespread claims of continuing and even accelerating growth rates, Internet traffic growth appears to be decelerating. In the United States, there was a brief period of 'Internet traffic doubling every 100 days' back in 1995-96, but by 1997 growth subsided towards an approximate doubling every year since 1998. And more recently even that growth rate has declined towards 50-60 percent per year," says the report. "If anything, the trend is down rather than up," says Andrew Odlyzko of the University of Minnesota's Digital Technology Center. "There is no sign of the predicted explosion of traffic."

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In fact, technological advances have allowed massive increases in the data capacity of networks, and those advances keep coming. Yes, there is growing congestion on cable systems, where the final bit of bandwidth is shared, leading Comcast, cable television company, to impose a 250GB-per-month limit on some subscribers. But the logjam is being alleviated by upgrades in cable technology, and there's little evidence of any capacity shortage.

However the service providers had recently warned of slow internet and its collapse unless some measures like levying fee on heavy internet users are taken. AT&T's top lobbyist, James Cicconi, had said, "we are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010."