Will There Be Enough Bandwidth and How Much Will It Cost?

With the price of gasoline sky rocketing, I would imagine that many IT and "info" workers would opt to telecommute as much as possible in the coming months, particularly this summer. Having written quite a bit about VPNs over the last couple of years including Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 VPN server capabilities in my latest book, I have always been partial to VPN connections to secure networks as a remote network access strategy rather than dial-up schemes that require a modem pool. The question is: will an increase use of Internet bandwidth eventually lead to increase bandwidth costs and a tiered access and delivery system?

Now I'm not saying that telecommuting alone is going to bring the Internet to a grinding halt. But a new way of charging for Internet connections has been advocated by a number of telecommunication companies that would base Internet use charges on the amount of data sent or received on the Internet system by a particular Internet connection.

Gasoline prices are certainly tied to a supply and demand economic model (although some of you might disagree with me) and I was wondering over the weekend if Internet bandwidth will also follow this same suite as the Web 2.0 concept rolls out and Internet users, particularly on the Web, chew up more and more bandwidth. I think you would have to agree that the current economic model on the Web (in terms of making money) is related to the number of hits that a particular Website gets. The money is actually generated by advertising. This is why Google makes tons of money (via advertising) and every for profit site on the Web looks for ways to increase the amount of traffic they get on their sites. So, the more bandwidth used by visitors to a particular site the better it is for that site (in terms of profit)

So, as folks on the Web use more Internet bandwidth (via popular Web social utilities such as Facebook and YouTube) and more info workers move data over VPNs will Telecom companies and cable television companies begin to scream for a tiered system (and higher Internet connection charges), citing the need to recoup the costs of existing Internet infrastructure investments and the future costs of laying high-speed fiber optic lines? So bottom line: will Internet bandwidth go the same way as gasoline in terms of pricing? What do you think?