Some years back, President George W. Bush was quoted as saying, “Are the highways of the internet becoming more few?” Despite his seemingly nonsensical quote, George W. may have been onto something, sort of. According to a new report, commuters on the Information Superhighway could be facing serious traffic jams by 2010.

The reason? Too much data traffic, not enough capacity, and not enough added capacity to keep pace with growth. Hmm, sounds like the freeways here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

One example given is YouTube, which was generating 27 petabytes worth of traffic per month as of mid 2007. To put that in perspective, 1 petabyte is 1,024 terabytes, or over 1 million gigabytes. Most desktop computers sold today have hard drives in the range of 250-500 Gigabytes, and only higher-end desktops are pushing into the terabyte range. So yeah, that’s a lot of traffic generated by a single site. Just to think, three years ago nobody even heard of YouTube.

What does this mean for you? If these predictions come to pass, without a major increase in capacity, you can expect to spend more time waiting for your Myspace profile to load. That means, of course, there is a greater chance of your boss catching you on Myspace. Now get back to work!

So enjoy your nice speedy connection while you can before it feels as sluggish as dialup, and go download some absurdly huge file!

If you want to read the whole report, you can (caution: it’s long). Me? I settled for the Cliff’s Notes version.