Will Hawaii run out of bandwidth? It's not out of the question.

There's a reason for at least stimulating some conversation about the topic of bandwidth, or “;IP traffic,”; as we say in the industry.

I wrote about this subject in 2008 when Ken Wirt, vice president of consumer marketing for Cisco Systems, came to Honolulu to give a talk to the Hawaii Broadband Task Force, a group of legislators and telecommunications executives who met monthly to examine issues affecting Hawaii's innovation economy.

The news that Ken delivered at the time was mind-blowing. What he said essentially was that the growth of video applications on the Internet was sucking up bandwidth like a giant vacuum pump.

So what's the upshot?

The Internet's pipes can handle only so much traffic, and at the rate we're going it's simply running out of capacity.

Given the current economic downturn, I figured that in 2010 we at least would have respite from this trend. I was curious what the latest data from Cisco was, so I dropped Wirt a line, just to see what the boys in Silicon Valley were thinking.

I was wrong about the respite.

According to Ken, the economic downturn has only slightly tempered traffic growth, and his latest forecasts haven't really changed that much from 2008. In other words, it's still pretty scary to look at the trends. The newest data shows global IP traffic will quintuple from 2008 to 2013 and that Internet video will account for more than 60 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2013.

This is important because the data flowing through the Internet pipes to our islands is like blood coursing through our veins. We need it to support productivity, growth and competitiveness in Hawaii, and the more bandwidth we utilize, the more productive we become.

Nowadays we are even more connected to our mobile devices than in 2008, and that means all broadband all the time. We'll need to deploy gobs of new fiber in this state to keep up with demand.

Naturally all major industries need broadband to survive. Back in 2008, Wirt said that if we didn't improve our state's telecommunications infrastructure, we wouldn't be as competitive as other tourist or business centers.

That is still true.

I realize that our state has a host of problems to grapple with. However, given our isolation in the middle of the Pacific, we need to pay close attention to our lines of communication to ensure that we'll continue to enjoy a high quality of life—not to mention jobs.