“YouTube alone consumes as much bandwidth today as the entire Internet consumed in 2000.”

That’s just one quote I like from an Op Ed piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune today (Treat coming data flood as an opportunity by Bruce Mehlman and Larry Irving). The article does a great job of outlining the growing demand of bandwidth and the exaflood.

The two points that stuck out for me include the fact that the army recently cutoff access to MySpace for soldiers because the drain on bandwidth. And the authors talk about bandwidth slowdown being the traffic jam of the future.

With such amazing weather over the weekend, I think that at least those of us in Minnesota took a few days off. I have had a deluge of email starting at about 7 am. Between that and the work required to delete the items from my in-box I have been frustrated by my own personal bandwidth traffic jam. (Aarrgh!)

Back to the article – the authors seem to be very positive about American’s future in regards to the Internet. That was refreshing since most articles I read seem to focus on our decline in world – but these authors seem to feel that all is not lost yet. Their recipe for success is pretty simple: “Minimize tax and regulatory constraints and maximize competition.”