NEW YORK – There has been a lot of speculation in recent weeks about whether global oil demand could soon outstrip global production capacity. During a panel discussion sponsored by the Internet Innovation Alliance today, several experts pondered whether something similar could soon happen with bandwidth.

The panel, dubbed "The Cost of the Exaflood," addressed problems that ISPs could experience as they try to keep up with the increased global bandwidth demand currently being driven by high-bandwidth applications such as peer-to-peer transfers and HD video streaming. Craig Moffett, a senior analyst for U.S. cable and satellite broadcasting for Sanford Bernstein, made the gloomiest predictions by saying that it was inevitable that major ISPs and content providers would experience significant losses in revenues as a result of increased bandwidth demand.

"We've got all kinds of stresses on the system right now, and I suspect that… we're going to see some pretty significant blow ups over the next few years," he said. "The rhetoric around this doesn't remotely match the economics."

Gary Smith, CEO of network infrastructure vendor Ciena, agreed with many of Moffett's points and said carriers would have to consider new pricing models that differ from the current model in which users pay a flat rate for a certain amount of bandwidth. Instead, he recommended that carriers begin charging users rates in direct proportion to the amount of bandwidth they consume.

"We're seeing a tremendous expansion of applications," he said. "The issue is, who pays for it and over what period of time are people going to get returns from that? Part of that responsibility goes to end users… We're going to have to get to a point where people pay for usage in some way. You can't continue to have a system where someone who uses just a small amount of bandwidth pays the same amount as someone who is streaming video for 24 hours a day."

Panelist Johna Till Johnson, CEO of Nemertes Research and a Network World columnist, agreed with the other panelists that ISPs would face some major challenges in making sufficient revenues as they upgraded their networks to handle increased bandwidth demand. The big problem, she said, was that while Web traffic has been growing at an exponential rate, the access capacity has been growing linearly. Thus, unless something changes in either traffic demand or access supply, Johnson predicts that there will not be enough bandwidth to meet global demand.