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For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

So begins a recent article in the New York Times about the growing concern amongst some industry observers that the Internet is reaching the limits of its capacity, thanks to the huge increase in streaming video and other media-heavy content we’ve seen in recent years.

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.

In a widely cited report published last November, a research firm projected that user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011. The title of a debate scheduled next month at a technology conference in Boston sums up the angst: “The End of the Internet?”

Tempting as it is to dismiss such overly dramatic generalizations as “The End of the Internet,” and despite the questionable nature of making this kind of sweeping prediction in such an ever-changing form of media, the article does raise a very valid point: We’re using a lot more bandwidth and resources now than we ever did before, and that rate is increasing at a very alarming rate.

The article doesn’t claim that the “end” will be a total crash of web services, but rather, an “Internet clogging in the form of sluggish download speeds and frustration with data-heavy services that become much less useful or enjoyable.”

And perhaps most significant is how this issue will affect the heated debate in America about governmental policies on broadband structure — “a matter that is expected to attract political attention after a new administration takes over in Washington.”

While experts debate the immediacy of the challenge, they agree that it points to a larger issue. In the Internet era, they say, high-speed networks are increasingly the economic and scientific petri dishes of innovation, spawning new businesses, markets and jobs. If American investment lags behind, they warn, the nation risks losing competitiveness to countries that are making the move to higher-speed Internet access a priority.

… The Internet, though a global network, is in many ways surprisingly local. It is a vast amalgam of smaller networks, all linked together. The worries about digital traffic congestion are not really about the Internet’s main trunk lines, the equivalent of network superhighways. Instead, the problem is close to home — the capacity of neighborhood switches, routers and pipes into a house. The cost of stringing high-speed optical fiber to a home, analysts estimate, can be $1,000 or more.

That is why Internet access speeds vary so much country by country. They depend on local patterns of corporate investment and government subsidy. Frederick J. Baker, a research fellow at Cisco, was attending a professional conference last month in Taiwan where Internet access is more than twice as fast and costs far less than his premium “high speed” service in California.

… In the United States, the investment required to cope with rising Internet traffic will need to be made at several levels, not just cable and telecommunications carriers. Tim Pozar, an engineer and a co-owner of the Internet services company UnitedLayer in San Francisco, said a number of forces were combining: the surge in bandwidth-hungry video applications on Web sites, the need to handle traffic from more Internet-enabled devices like cellphones, and shortages of electrical power for data centers in places like San Francisco.

“We’re running out of horsepower to accommodate the demand,” said Mr. Pozar, whose company’s data centers support Web sites for customers ranging from museums to social networks. “And upgrades needed in data centers are going to be a lot more expensive than in the past, now that all the excess capacity left over after the dot-com bubble burst has been gobbled up.” The pace of future demand is the big uncertainty surrounding the Internet traffic challenge, and how fast people will adopt emerging technologies is notoriously difficult to foresee.

Some observers think all this might be pointing to a fragmentation of the Internet, where several other webs are utilized to meet varying needs. At any rate, this is all probably connected with such recent news as TiVo’s announcement that they’re bringing YouTube to consumers’ TV sets.

We can confidently disagree with the report that the Internet will face some kind of crippling crisis in the year 2011. But it’s harder to state that no other problems will happen between now and then. As the Internet continues to evolve, it’ll no doubt take new directions that we can’t even predict yet. That’s one of the reasons why it continues to fascinate, and why it’s essential to get the best Internet partner you can find now, before things get even more chaotic.