The massive upsurge in the data that companies collect, store and move has required a commensurate increase in bandwidth needs. Slow bandwidth not only creates the risk of alienating customers, but it can cost a business a lot of money through wasted productivity. Ed Sperling at Forbes calculates that a business with 30,000 workers can lose 2,000 hours of productivity every week if slow access to the web causes them an average wait of one minute a day.

Fortunately for large enterprises today, the supply of dark fiber meets the demand. But, Sperling warns, eventually the supply is going to dwindle as more activities move online. When the large carriers such as AT&T and Verizon have to upgrade their fiber networks for more bandwidth, they will pass those costs on to users.

"This is a triple-whammy for corporate IT spending," Sperling cautions. "There's more data to store, more data to move and more bandwidth required to move it--even more when you consider many companies are now moving applications around the enterprise and using off-site clouds to run their applications."

The costs are going to grow with time, particularly in an unregulated telecom environment, he cautions. At some point, companies may feel the heat.

For more:
- see Ed Sperling's post at Forbes

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