Capacity crunch coming?
However, while the fact the globe is embracing broadband, boosting infrastructure and allowing people to find new uses for the web and its next generation technologies is good news, another report has warned that there could be a ‘broadband crunch' in the UK.
In his research paper, first published in Science, David Richardson of the University of Southampton, said "further innovation and breakthroughs in the basic fibre infrastructure are urgently required," if the UK is to avoid a ‘capacity crunch'.
While the argument that the UK's aging communications infrastructure is struggling to cope with extra demand for bandwidth-hungry services is not breaking news, Richardson has warned crunch time could happen quite soon. He said: "We are beginning to hit the fundamental limits of the current technology."
Speaking to the BBC, he said: "We need to be looking at the next big breakthrough to allow us to continue to scale as we have traditionally done. If you gain a factor of two in bandwidth by developing a whole new amplifier technology, that's perhaps two or three years of capacity growth. To get radical changes - to get factors of 100 or 1000 - it's going to be extremely demanding."
In his paper, Richardson recommends going back to the basics of optics- the light pipes themselves.
"Without radical innovation in our physical network infrastructure-that is, improvements in the key physical properties of transmission fibres and the optical amplifiers that we rely on to transmit data over long distances-we face what has been widely referred to as a "capacity crunch" that could severely constrain future Internet growth, as well as having social and political ramifications," he wrote.
He also blamed some of the growth in data traffic, which is increasing by 40 percent year-on-year on the rise of social networking, cloud computing and video services like YouTube.
"Video is responsible for most of the increased demand and with high definition firmly established in the marketplace and both 3D and ultrahigh-definition formats emerging, this trend is set to continue," he added.
