We’ve talked off and on about the probability that Internet video could lead to a disastrous bandwidth crunch. And we’re not the only ones. Voice over IP requires reliable packet delivery, and the About VoIP blog recently touched on this issue:

The whole net neutrality debate was sparked, from what I interpret, when Internet providers felt they had to apply a tiered price structure for connections based on expected usage. Fact is, if we suddenly had the billion or so current Internet users all using VoIP and/or IPTV simultaneously, the current infrastructure couldn’t handle it. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)

Nope, that’s a pretty good estimate — and a lot better than the politically-charged interpretations coming from pro-”neutrality” activists.

We all probably want faster connection speeds, and they’re coming, but will take time to roll out. What could come sooner is a new set of video compression codecs … coupled with high-power graphics cards sporting their very own quad cores or more. If our graphics cards were powerful enough, and we used super-crunched video formats, we might possibly reduce bandwidth requirements down to a point where every Internet user could potentially watch Internet TV simultaneously.

Interesting. Hey, sounds great to us. But as good as quad core is, we should still be building out our broadband infrastructure, especially in fiber-to-the-home. No reason we can’t have both.