Unless some serious upgrades are made to the internet network infrastructure soon, users are going to experience slower and more unreliable connections as soon as next year.

Growing demand for streaming multimedia content from the likes of YouTube and the BBC iPlayer are already using copious amounts of bandwidth, and usage is likely to increase rapidly in the near future.
Many more people are working from home, putting even more pressure on the available bandwidth.

Experts predict that without network upgrades the internet will no linger be reliable enough for business use. It will become nothing more than an unreliable toy. Computers will freeze and drop off line as early as next year according to US based think-tank Nemertes.

According to website Internet World Stats, internet users totalled almost 1.6 billion in March this year, compared with about 361 million at the end of 2000. There was a 342% increase between 2000 and 2008, and over 23% of the world population now uses the internet.

Ismail Ismail, director at Webcredible, which monitors web performance, said, “The problem is that the infrastructure of the web was developed long before sites like BBC iPlayer and YouTube existed and bandwidth is now being eaten up faster than was imagined.”

He said Lord Carter’s Digital Britain agenda, which aims to get broadband to everyone in the UK by 2012, will make the problem worse.

“If businesses suffer downtime problems and a slow connection, all the good work done by these companies could be undone by something they have no control over, with their previous investment in user experience severely undermined by the lack of bandwidth.”