Thanks to Mike O’Connor for passing on this study to Bernadine Joselyn who passed it on to me…

Nemertes Research recently released a study on Internet infrastructure. Here’s the executive summary:

Our findings indicate that although core fiber and switching/routing resources will scale nicely to support virtually any conceivable user demand, Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, will likely cease to be adequate for supporting demand within the next three to five years. We estimate the financial investment required by access providers to “bridge the gap” between demand and capacity ranges from $42 billion to $55 billion, or roughly 60%-70% more than service providers currently plan to invest.

It’s important to stress that failing to make that investment will not cause the Internet to collapse. Instead, the primary impact of the lack of investment will be to throttle innovation-both the technical innovation that leads to increasingly newer and better applications, and the business innovation that relies on those technical innovations and applications to generate value. The next Google, YouTube, or Amazon might not arise, not because of a lack of demand, but due to an inability to fulfill that demand. Rather like osteoporosis, the underinvestment in infrastructure will painlessly and invisibly leach competitiveness out of the economy.

Perhaps the most interesting point of the study (as Mike pointed out) is the funders, which includes in Nemertes’ words “users, makers of, and investors in, technology”. In other words telephone companies and other interested parties may have funded this resource.

Reading the reaction to the article on the report is actually more fun that reading the report itself. (Comments found here.) It reminded me of librarianship 101 classes on information literacy. It also reminded me of Rep Al Juhnke’s astute comments at the Blandin Broadband Conference last month when he mentioned that so much of the info legislators get on technology comes from vendors.