Times Online reports that Internet users face regular ‘brownouts’ that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace, according to research to be published later this year.
Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer. It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time.
From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an ‘unreliable toy’. A report being compiled by Nemertes Research, a respected American think-tank, will warn that the web has reached a critical point and that even the recession has failed to stave off impending problems. Engineers are already preparing for the worst.
While some are planning a lightning-fast parallel network called ‘the grid’, others are building ‘caches’, private computer stations where popular entertainments are stored on local PCs rather than sent through the global backbone. Telephone companies want to recoup escalating costs by increasing prices for ‘net hogs’ who use more than their share of capacity.