2012: Countdown to Internet “Flattening”

It’s official: the Internet is reaching its limits. The increasing use of  Internet-connected devices and new applications hungry for broadband will lead to serious issues with the Net within the next four years.

The news was made official by Nemertes Research, a research-advisory firm specializing in analyzing and quantifying emerging technologies, when it released a new study entitled “Internet Interrupted: Why Architectural Limitations Will Fracture the Net.”

The title pretty much says it all, but essentially the study suggests that the Internet is being pushed to its limits, both physically and logically, placing great amounts of stress on the system which will eventually see it “flattening”. Demand is outpacing growth at the access layer, and IP addresses are diminishing rapidly.

Ted Ritter, a research analyst with Nemertes Research, said that “the Internet is shape-shifting. Traffic is increasingly moving off the public Internet onto paid or private overlay networks”, leading to a “flattening and shifting of the Internet”.

However, if you are worried that one day the Internet will simply implode and leave everyone stranded back in the stone age, then fear not. Ritter has declared that, “none of this means the Internet will abruptly stop working”. Rather, it seems that it will be in the field of innovation where the greatest slowdown will occur, and the deployment of next-generation applications will be hindered by limitations to the access bandwidth.

On top of all this, the logical infrastructure of the Internet was also studied in the report. The findings are quite worrying, suggesting that addresses for new networks and devices are running out, with 85% of addresses already allocated. At this rate, by 2012 addresses will be totally exhausted due to the growth of Internet-enabled devices and machine-machine communications.

There is also bad news for IPv6, the expected follow-up to IPv4, the current Internet Protocol addressing system, as only 1% of IT decision makers are participating in the deployment of IPv6.

All of this makes for pretty scary reading, but the truth is that no one really knows what will happen to the Web over the next few years. What is certain, however, is that something will have to be done if we don’t want to see some serious problems taking effect in the near future.

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