UK internet traffic triples in one year

NEWS Linx, a non-profit organisation owned by ISPs, has recorded levels of five gigabits per second, which works out at about 300,000 emails every second. Chris Fletcher, head of technology development at Linx, said: "We are actively monitoring our networks to keep an eye on traffic. At the moment its infrastructure is based on gigabit ethernet but we will move to 10 gigabit when it arrives." The organisation claims it will be able to manage continued growth estimated at one gigabit per second every three months. However, James Eibisch, research manager at IDC, explained that other parts of the internet infrastructure will creak under the weight of immense traffic. He said: "Individual service provider networks will suffer and some customers will move to other ISPs, resulting in more industry consolidation." He added that it might become more advantageous for ISPs to hand the traffic side of the business to backbone providers such as UUNET and Level 3. In this scenario, ISPs will only provide ASP services, content, commerce, marketing and web hosting. Dario Betti, analyst at Ovum research, said that another way ISPs can create relief from huge increases in traffic is to direct content through a content delivery network. Companies operating in this arena can provide services such as streaming media and website customised content through partnerships with ISPs. However, Betti admitted that this will not eliminate severe bottleneck problems, which can only be resolved by further investment in infrastructure.