Gridlock
The problem discussed in your article "Internet Gridlock" (July/August 2008) is actually a side effect of a more profound transition in patterns of network usage.

While the Internet is often touted as a "general­-purpose network" capable of supporting a wide range of innovative uses, in its present state it's actually a very uniform system tuned for short file transfers, like e-mail and Web browsing--transfers that are typically completed in less than one second each. The limited duration of these transactions makes bandwidth available for data from multiple users on shared pipes, and this multiplexing is the key to the Internet's economic efficiency. The usage pattern combines comfortably with the modest requirements of voice-over-­Internet-­protocol (VoIP) phone traffic, the most common exception to the paradigm of short file ­transfers.