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:
https://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 their
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.