Could the internet be growing slower than the web?

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/04/30/research-suggests-internet-could-run-out-of-bandwidth-in-the-coming-years/
Crunchgear talks about how its a possibility that the web is growing faster than the internet is. As we said, the internet is just a bunch of equipment that holds the web. So we use the nodes on the internet in order to access the web. A certain number of people can be accessing each node via a certain edge at a time. So, if too many people are trying to access the node via the same edge what happens? The theory is that it will be like we have "brownouts", where we don't get optimal performance anymore.

Personally i think that the likelihood is fairly low. Maybe in some local places, where it is easy to saturate your bandwidth by downloading, but at Northwestern, one would have to be moving huge amounts of data in order to slow the internet to a crawl.

The internet itself can be slowed down greatly, just like what happened on the west coast about a month ago. Vandals destroyed some cables at a major networking hub and there goes the internet, at the same time people can be adding websites and blogs back and forth while bandwith as a whole for everyone continues to shrink.

It is completely possible to have the web outweigh the internet, but I think this would happened when parts of the internet are wiped out instead of having the web grow faster than the internet. This can especially hold true when major submarine cable hubs, as found in florida, can be wiped out by some kind of freak accident or purposefully. Probably not many people know that most of the internet traffic that connects the world is done through underwater fiber optic cables, called submarine cables. These cables have a ton of protection and insulation on them and are laid all over the world's oceans, but they are prone to breaking. Large ships can destroy them and there are constantly repairs being made to them. New cables are also being laid down.

The article below, written in 2008, shows how the world's internet capacity, on average, over the past two years has grown more than the increase in internet traffic. So far we are safe. http://www.telegeography.com/wordpress/index.html%3Fp=75.html

A popular science article was written recently on "who protects the internet". Basically it says that if there weren't people repairing broken cables, than internet traffic would come to a halt. There are only so many edges connecting the parts of the world together, more connecting the US to Europe than other parts of the world, so we are less vulnerable. The article talks about how internet traffic can completely overcome the internet itself when cable hubs are destroyed. These hubs serve as gatekeepers in the social network of tubes that is the internet. And with these gatekeepers destroyed, the world's connections would severely decrease, causing the web to overtake the internet.

PopSci article: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-03/who-protects-intrnet

This is a very real concern in some download heavy situations. In fact, this limit of bandwidth available to some servers is what gave rise with peer-to-peer technology. P2P systems (such as torrents) rely on a decentralized network of many computers to each deliver small sections of files to each other. In most settings, a computer will be receiving files from multiple nodes, and also sending other files to different nodes, individually at much slower rates than a server, but cumulatively this can become an effective data flow. This eliminates the need for powerful servers to deliver excessive data flow, by creating many virtual edges between nodes that have the files, and those that are requesting them. I made an MS paint hypothetical scenario of data flow. As one can imagine, a server acts as a bridge between all data between nodes, and thus has a lot more stress to deal with than a dynamic network of decentralized peers. The benefits of P2P are that it requires no high-bandwidth, and if a single node gets knocked out by vandals, there are still others that can offset the loss. The disadvantages are that it requires peers to be reliable information sources. Many torrent users behave as "leeches", people who take data, but do not upload data to other nodes. If too many nodes leech, then information becomes unreliable and slow. The node colored red is an example of a node that becomes such an information sink behaves like. Also, it can become a difficult task to effectively organize very large networks to optimize data flow at an ever-changing rate.[img][/img]

I guess the point is that new, more efficient data transfer methods will allow for making more out of the existing bandwidth until improved physical edges in the internet are implemented.