With the current upsurge in broadcast television companies (specifically the BBC) providing content over the internet and users starting to download “umissable”programmes, the flood of data transfer for very big items– namely half and one hour TV programs is starting to threaten the current internet capacity. Ultimately this could cause the internet to grind to a halt.
This article in the Times discusses this further:
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3716781.ece
Over view:
The web was “born” in 1990 when Tim Berners-Lee created a mechanism allowing disparate electronic documents to be located in a systematic manner and thus easily accessed. This work was carried out largely at CERN.
It relied on the existence of a network of connections which were originally designed to provide a resilient means of communication during the cold war era. The reason behind this was the USA’s desire to have a cross connected network of “telephone wires” which would still automatically function if any individual link was broken (by a missile attack). The idea being that they system would automatically find a way around any break by using other routes (the other sides of a triangle). This was known as ARPANET
During the 1980’s and beyond a large amount telephone connections were laid around the world. These are known as “dark fibre” because rather than electrical cables, they used light to send the communication signal meaning much higher capacity per cable. Because of an economic down turn the connections remained “dark” and Internet service providers could pick up (this) capacity very cheaply. This oversupply of capacity has remained with even more fibres being wrapped around the world.
With the advent of video being transmitted the size of a “communication” soared: an email may take a few 1000 bytes (or chunks) of data, a high definition TV program will take a million times more.
Suddenly the unused space is being gobbled up much much faster.
In transport terms: there are some really big lorries using the paths that ramblers happily walk down.