The Internet will reach its maximum capacity by 2010 thanks to the proliferation of online video content, according to Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for US telecoms giant AT&T.

"The surge in online content is at the centre of the most dramatic changes affecting the internet today," said Cicconi at last week’s Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 in London.

"Eight hours of video are loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become High-Definition [HD] very soon, and HD is seven to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80% of all traffic by 2010, up from 30% today," he said, adding that in three years, 20 London households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet did in 1995.

“We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010.”

In response to Cicconi’s widely-reported pronouncement, Internet security infrastructure company Verisign (which is under contract to the US Department of Commerce to operate the Internet’s DNS servers for the .com and .net domains) issued a press release announcing it would boost the Internet’s capacity tenfold by 2010.

The company, which operates two of the Internet’s thirteen root nameservers, said it will increase its DNS query capacity from 400 billion queries a day to four trillion and boost the bandwidth of its proprietary constellation of resolution systems from 20 gigabits per second to over 200Gbps.

Calling its plan ‘Project Titan’, Verisign also intends to distribute its infrastructure across more than 100 locations worldwide in an effort to improve Internet traffic flow and counter region-specific cyber-attacks.

The Internet upgrade will include a range of new monitoring and response services, with the ability to detect, isolate and halt security threats to the .com and .net provisioning and resolution systems.

Verisign’s chief technology officer Ken Silva said the first stage was focusing on the speed and range of the Net’s infrastructure, while “this next stage will focus on ensuring that the level of security exceeds demands, such as new attacks coming from wireless devices, to keep the infrastructure stable and operational.”

Meanwhile, the use of bandwidth for streaming video continues to prove a controversial issue in the UK. The BBC’s popular new iPlayer, which streams large video files, is under fire from a consortium of ISPs who are threatening to charge the public broadcaster for taking up excessive amounts of bandwidth.

The Financial Times reported that large ISPs Tiscali UK and Carphone Warehouse are threatening to degrade service unless the BBC comes up with a “cost-sharing arrangement”, while Tiscali is also reportedly considering a “two-tiered” system which would charge more to high-bandwidth users.

Further reading

Internet capacity 'full by 2010' Report finds demand growing faster than infrastructure investment

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