“The fact is that the core trunk routes of the Internet are built on very fast fibre optic cable, which even with such explosive growth of the Internet in recent years are not running at even close to full capacity. It is also relatively easy to add new cabling capacity alongside existing infrastructure and upgrade switches and routers to handle increasing data capacity. As such, there isn’t much chance the Internet will fall over any time soon.
However there is a problem in that most of the UK’s infrastructure to the home (the so called ‘last mile’) is largely copper based and not easily adaptable to handle very high volumes of data. To plug this gap and potentially avoid much of the estimated £20 billion cost of providing fibre optic cable to the home across the UK wireless broadband services may be the alternative that could enable the next generation of high speed, bandwidth intensive services such as high definition TV over the Internet. New wireless WiMAX technology for instance shows it is possible to achieve download speeds of up to 65 Mbps at close range to users, this would be sufficient to plug many of the gaps in the internet infrastructure quickly and at much lower cost and inconvenience than digging up roads to lay new cable.”