Social networks began, like so many things, with the teen-aged population who made MySpace and Facebook the fastest-growing sites on the Internet and a seemingly instant global phenomenon. Social networking has now expanded to include a wealth of affinity groups at sites like Gather.com, and specifically targeted social networks such as the one Disney launched for kids at this month's Consumer Electronics Show.

The next leap for social networks was into the video space, where YouTube dominated as the pioneer of user-created video. Now social networking of the video kind is poised to make the leap onto TV screens via IPTV and other means, creating both opportunities and challenges for telecom service providers as they roll out video services.

One vision of the future, as laid out by Cisco Systems Chairman and CEO John Chambers at Telecom World 2006 in Hong Kong in December, foresees a world linked by high-quality personalized video generating 15 exabytes (an exabyte equals a billion gigabytes) per month in Internet traffic by 2010, using technologies such as telepresence.

“The real opportunity is for service providers to figure out how to unify these communications experiences together — instant messaging, e-mail, video and voice — into a much more cohesive experience for the end user, whether that end user is enterprise, small business or consumer,” said Jeff Spagnola, vice president of worldwide service provider marketing for Cisco.

At the same time, this initial flood of user-generated content in the video space will pose problems for networks designed primarily for downloading Internet content, said Mark Taylor, vice president of content markets for Level 3 Communications, which provides the Internet backbone services for MySpace.

“Particularly the cable network — they architected their networks using the technology of [several] years ago,” he said. “Upstream is causing problems for them. DSL networks were architected in the same way, but it is slightly easier for them to change, to deal with that upstream traffic. There is still an issue for everyone on being able to pay for all this stuff. There will be huge volumes of more traffic, but if you look at what ISPs are charging for their pipes, they are giving faster and faster access to users for the same amount of money or even less.”

That bandwidth crunch could put pressure on service providers to find new business cases, said Peter Carbone, chief architect in the chief technology officer's office at Nortel Networks. “There will be a rebuild of the metro network required,” he said. “What we are looking for is networking technology that is low cost, which is where we believe carrier Ethernet is going to go. But certainly there have to be some services and service value to justify the network rebuild or it won't happen. That's why we see this following after IPTV deployment.”