A follow-up to last year's landmark report, The Internet SingularityDelayed: Why Limits in Internet Capacity Will Stifle Innovation on the Web,the latest study finds demand continues to grow swiftly-driven by moreInternet-connected devices and new bandwidth-hungry applications. Traffic ismigrating away from the public core of the Internet and onto private andsemiprivate overlay networks.

"The Internet is shape-shifting," says Ted Ritter, research analyst withNemertes Research. "Traffic is increasingly moving off the public Internetonto paid or private overlay networks. Content providers-such as NBC, whichused Limelight Networks to stream the 2008 Olympics-are driving the trendtoward a flattening, and shifting of the Internet."

The result for users is improved service quality for favored content, andover time, the performance distinction between "favored" and"general-delivery" content will increase. "None of this means the Internetwill abruptly stop working," says Ritter. "Instead, the slowdown will be inthe area of innovation. Ultimately, access bandwidth limitations will hamperdeployment of next-generation applications."

The study also looked at its logical infrastructure. The Internet israpidly running out of addresses to assign to new networks and devices-85% ofaddresses already are allocated. Address exhaustion will occur before 2012 inthe face of the accelerating growth of the number of Internet-enabled devicesand of machine-machine communications.

"Requirements for multi-homing--providing multiple, separate routes to agiven address-and ever-increasing mobility are placing added stress on thecurrent Internet logical infrastructure," says Dr. Mike Jude, senior analystwith Nemertes Research. "In effect, the Internet could fracture back intogroups of networks."

The report shows how IPv6, the presumed successor to the current InternetProtocol addressing scheme (IPv4), is too little too late. Only 1% of ITdecision-makers participating in Nemertes benchmark, Advanced CommunicationsServices 2008, are deploying IPv6.

To read the complete study, Internet Interrupted: Why ArchitecturalLimitations Will Fracture the 'Net,' visit www.nemertes.com.

About Nemertes Research

Nemertes Research is a research-advisory firm that specializes inanalyzing and quantifying the business value of emerging technologies. You canlearn more about Nemertes Research at our Website www.nemertes.com.

SOURCE Nemertes Research