ST. LOUIS – With 2009 winding down in the fourth quarter, it is time to make predictions for the upcoming year. With the internet at a ripe technological and performance era, and competition keener than ever, where is this miraculous medium heading?

Scanning the very web for help in those predictions, ZDNet.com, Gizmodo.com, ReportLinker.com and CrunchGear.com offered these opinions about the year 2010 in the internet realm.

Capacity Issues?

ZDNet covered this dire warning from an executive at AT&T.

Jim Cicconi, Vice President of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.

"The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today," he said. "In three years' time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today."

Cicconi, who was speaking at the Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 as part of a wider series of meetings with U.K. government officials, said that at least $55 billion worth of investment was needed in new infrastructure in the next three years in the U.S. alone, with the figure rising to $130 billion to improve the network worldwide. "We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010," he said.

AT&T later clarified: They pointed out that Cicconi was mis-quoted, and the doomy prediction was from a study, What he actually said was, "In three years' time, 20 typical households here in London will generate more traffic than the entire Internet did back in 1995."

The Mobile Web

A quick overview from ReportLinker.com...

The number of PCs in use worldwide has surpassed 1 billion and there are one and a half billion internet users globally. At the same time there are more than 4 billion mobile subscribers, indicating the vast growth potential for mobile internet, especially considering that 58 percent of the world's installed PCs are in markets that account for only 15 percent of the world's population, meaning that for a majority of the potential users the handset is their main internet terminal.

Mobile surfers in Western markets are to a large degree fixed Internet users that use the mobile device as an alternative channel. There is a larger degree of mobile Internet users among the general population of internet users than there is in the general population of mobile users. It is therefore important for mobile service providers and operators to recognize that it is the PC and what users see and come across there that to a large degree inspires and motivates what they do on the mobile internet and what they expect from services there.

Internet Everywhere

Plug-in broadband, wireless access and surfing on the airplane – these are just a few examples of the Internet everywhere in 2010. Crunch Gear has another opinion...

The beauty of the Internet is that it’s scalable. There is no reason to offer the full Internet in contexts where only a little Internet is better. The Internet is also best in non-dedicated devices. Think about in-car entertainment systems with 40 gigabyte drives hidden somewhere in the car. This system will be wonderfully quaint in a few years and downright obsolete in a few more. I’d rather be able to browse the web from my phone than my car simply because the pace of in-car electronics is outstripped by the pace of cellphone improvements.
In short, we don’t need Internet everywhere – we need it where it makes sense.