As more and more people download albums and watch movies via the web, are we heading for an ‘internet crunch’?Did it take your browser a little bit longer than normal to open this article? Have you found yourself twiddling your thumbs recently as you wait two or three seconds (rather than the usual millisecond) for an email to send? Perhaps you’ve even found yourself making a cup of tea while waiting for the homepage of a particularly image-heavy website to download. Using the web, do you sometimes feel like you’re stuck in 1998 – all slow connections and snail-paced emails – rather than 2008?

If so, it might be because somewhere else on the web, a few thousand people are watching last week’s Question Time or downloading the new Coldplay album (though heaven knows why). Welcome to the internet crunch. As more web-surfers listen to music and watch TV shows and movies, there is great concern that the broadband infrastructure won’t be able to cope, and that things will slow down and possibly even come to a standstill.

New audio- and video-based sites have started to take up more and more bandwith, yet the networks – all those miles of fibre-optic cables that were laid in recent years – have not been properly upgraded. As a result, the infrastructure of the internet, the physical stuff it is built on, will potentially struggle to cope with increased demand for new, improved, snazzy online services.

All of these new services are putting an extraordinary strain on the infrastructure. For example, downloading a film in the Blu-Ray format (that’s high definition) takes up as much bandwith as a whopping 2.5m emails or 100m webpage downloads. Fifteen years ago, people like me thought it was amazing that we could send an email to a friend; today’s web-users think little of sending the equivalent of a couple of million emails as they download the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

And when you consider that the first episode of The Apprentice was watched 100,000 times via iPlayer – which must be the equivalent of someone sending millions and millions of emails, or visiting an ordinary website a few billion times – it is clear that the bandwith and infrastructure issue is one that needs to be resolved.

Is there likely to be a collapse of the internet, or is than an exaggeration? Clearly the infrastructure needs to be improved, but who should fund that improvement? If we demand that the government stumps up the money, won’t that mean increased government control – and therefore more government regulation and restriction – of the internet in general? Does anyone want that?

These questions will be answered in the future when the real internet needs will be visible.