Knowledge is power and the internet information super highway has empowered us all. It gives us unprecedented access to information from around the globe and truly revolutionises the world we live in.

What is better than the internet is even bigger internet. The evolution of the broadband era has taken the power of the Web to a new level. However, such has been the demand for video content that the internet has struggled to keep up. YouTube’s own capacity demand now is equal to the entire internet around the time of the millennium. And with consumer demand increasing the issue is set to get more challenging unless action is taken.

It is a familiar scenario: we need more space, so we will add more space, then we expand our habits to fill it and once again we need more space. It seems as though our vast broadband super highways are once again clogging up, this time with juggernaut traffic jams.

The doomsday advocates say that our insatiable appetite for online video watching will break the internet by about 2010. Even though this is overstating the case somewhat it does nethertheless highlight the need for action from the internet community. In reality the worst case scenario is that online video and VoIP streaming use will just slow the internet down to snail speeds, so essentially taking us back to the dial-up era, the metaphorical stone-age of the internet epoch. But what needs to happen to avoid this slow down?