Internet network to be tested in the next 5 years

From ITWire:

"A new study forecasts that demand for Internet bandwidth will grow by an order of magnitude in five years, straining current network architectures to the limit.

The study "World bandwidth growth over the next decade – is it viable? " was authored by David Payne of the Institute of Advanced Telecommunications, Swansea University in the UK and sponsored by CIP Technologies, a UK provider of photonics products, technical services and consultancy.

CIP's CTO, David Smith, said: "The Global Bandwidth Study demonstrates that current telecom networks will be unable to cope with the scaling demands for bandwidth. A step-change in technology is needed that can not only deliver this bandwidth demand at economic cost but also significantly reduce the amount of energy required to power and cool it."

Article continues...

What does this mean - so as customer data continues to grow larger and more sophisticated in nature, as the interface with which customers manage their data becomes more personalised, again sophisticated and capable, as the marketing messages become either more targeted and/or immersive in nature, and as the competition for eyeballs increases between banks and even other industries, so too will grow the demand on the infrastructure that provides these experiences.

How will we combat this? How will we make our interactions simpler, smaller, less overbose, to enable clean, quick connections for our customers? Does web 2.0 in its current state mean smaller packets of data are transmitted, where dhtml, xml, rss and other code formats will replace html, flash, etc?