The average size of a Web page has tripled in the past five years, on track with other studies that show demand for bandwidth has been tripling at about the same rate.

For those that think DSL and cable modem services are "good enough," those copper-based systems can't keep up with demand that triples twice a decade. The cable Internet providers, despite their "up to six megabits" advertisements, would not be trying to throttle popular services like peer to peer filesharing if their copper networks were not groaning under the load. And that is today. Where does that leave communities in five years?