Internet stress fracture

While the failing economy has been the focus for the last few months, the internet may also be turning into a victim.

Nemertes Research has released a 70-page study revealing it predicts a major internet “stress fracture” within the next four years, which will see more traffic move to private and semi-private networks.

“Demand pushing against physical and logical limitations is stressing the internet. Internet demand continues to outpace growth in network capacity at the access layer, and IP addresses are quickly depleting,” the report says.

Nemertes analyst Ted Ritter says the result will see the establishment of private and semi-private networks, which will provide a higher standard of performance, and “ultimately, access bandwidth limitations will hamper deployment of next-generation applications”.

“Requirements for multi-homing – providing multiple, separate routes to a given address – and ever-increasing mobility, are placing added stress on the current internet logical infrastructure. In effect, the internet could fracture back into groups of networks,” Nemertes senior analyst Mike Jude told itwire.com.