Nemertes Research experts predict that consumer demand (monthly traffic across the Internet is now running at about eight exabytes), growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply by next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and HDTV Web services.

It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed (“brownouts”), rendering the Internet an “unreliable toy.”