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*WARNING* This post contains facts and not just conjecture!
The concept of a major impediment in internet growth is actually a concern among network engineers at large ISP's, and is widely discussed at events like NANOG and RIPE. It is quite probable that there will be some very difficult problems to work through in the next few years.
Here's the problem.
During the time the Internet first started being used popularly, it was mostly small circuits at ISP's (T1's and T3s) feeding into slightly larger circuits at Tier1 (or larger Tier2) ISPs - T3's and OC3's, maybe an OC12 here or there on the larger ISP's. There was plenty of money available for research, and OC48's became available, and eventually OC192. At the same time, Ethernet rose from being a very primative and generally unusable standard from an ISP perspective (10-Half) to 10-Full, 100-Full, Gig-E, and then 10GE. There was plenty of money available for this research. during the .com boom. For a variety of reasons, 10GE is far cheaper to produce and use than OC192 (Both of which carry approximately 10GBPS). 10GE was widely available for about 3 years now. In the past, networks were mostly SONET circuits (OC-x), but now, mostly 10GE and GE, due to cost.
The Ethernet group, for a variety of reasons, which includes: bad predictive forecasting, infighting, and lack of funding, has yet to make a standard of faster than 10G in that timeframe. You now have a situation where large hosting companies, and large eyeball networks (eg cableco's) connect to Tier 1 networks with 10GE, and then those Tier1 networks have their backbone then run over 10GE networks - the same size circuit as they are selling to customers.
Tier1's have handled the growing problem by upgrading backbone links from 1*10GE to 2*10GE to 4*10GE, and in some cases 8*10GE. Unfortunately, Depending on the router manufacturer, the limit is generally either 4*10GE or 8*10GE for any one link, and they are already running those "hot". Further, if a router has a maximum of 32 10GE ports, and you have 8 ports to one router, and 8 ports to another router (for redundancy), that now only leaves you with 16 ports left to sell from there, an unfortunate situation.
The Ethernet group has been arguing if the way forward should be 40GE or 100GE, and in the meantime, no research on how either can be delivered has been done. They have now finally decided that BOTH 40GE and 100GE will be standardized, and research is now starting. Large Tier1 networks, and even some large Eyeball and Content networks already need "something faster than 10ge" --- TODAY.
If growth continues as it has, and the 40/100GE projects take as long as expected, well, lets just put it this way, we'll have problems on the internet that we never had before, and it'll be interesting to see what the effects are, and if it's possible to come up with temporary solutions.
Apologies for posting facts instead of just guessing or hypothesizing or making stuff up.
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