MONTREAL - There's no stopping voracious consumer demand for high-definition video on Internet-based services and the hunger to fill flat screens with pretty pictures has networks screaming for bigger and faster pipelines.

Those who make the gear that makes up the Internet's backbone - already straining to accommodate demand for low-definition video on the Web - have had to come up with a new generation of technology to respond to the new need for "monster" bandwidth.

High-definition video is certainly among the most demanding of beasts, with its much greater resolution and vast transmission requirements. But it's not alone, as bandwidth hogs like conventional cable TV and mobile video phones are also vying for more, more, more.

"We're just bandwidth monsters," says Philippe Morin, president of Nortel Network's (TSX:NT) Metro Ethernet Networks unit.

"We have this appetite for more and more bandwidth, for more and more video."

Morin's Nortel unit recently announced new technology that will allow fibre optic cables thinner than a human hair to carry even more information globally.

That means Internet service providers can quadruple the capacity of the current industry network standard of 10G (gigabits per second) right away and eventually increase it to 100G with the same link carrying 10 times the traffic, he said.

"What's really been happening in the last nine to 12 months is that the world has been moving to high-definition video," Morin said in an interview at the Nortel unit's Montreal offices.

"Users are going to be looking for their content on any device whether at home, or on their PC, or on the road, or on their BlackBerry. And it's got to be high-definition."

Morin describes Nortel's new technology as a highway and high-definition videos as 18-wheel trucks that take up a lot of room, especially during rush hour.

"So now the technology can allow not just 18-wheelers but it can allow four of them to be stacked up. You use the existing fibre that has been laid out and you increase the bandwidth. So the end user has a much faster speed and shouldn't see any congestion."

Canadians watched 2.4 billion videos, most of them in low definition, on their computers during the month of December 2007, said U.S.-based ComScore, which measures how the Internet is used.

"No. 1 is Google sites but the vast majority of that is YouTube," said senior analyst Andrew Lipsman.

Google sites, Microsoft sites and Yahoo sites are the top three with Canadians and they all carry a lot of video, Lipsman said from Chicago.

On a per person basis, Canadians watch about 115 videos a month on computers while Americans watch an average of roughly 40 per person, Lipsman added.

"Now all of a sudden we've sort of taken up all of the capacity that we have with the way that we use the Internet, but the reality is that everyone wants high def."

Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO), the world's largest Internet networking supplier, also has new technologies to allow Internet service providers to increase bandwidth.

It has developed technology allowing Internet service providers to expand existing infrastructure to give consumers up to 100 megabits per second bandwidth - as high as 10 times the current data rate in many cases, said Olaf Krahmer, vice-president of the service providers unit at Cisco Systems Canada.

Cisco is also involved in optical technology (fibre optics) as well as technology to increase the core of the Internet service providers' networks.

"From a technology point of view, there's really no reason why the Internet should come to a standstill," Krahmer said.

"In today's traffic numbers you don't see any high-definition in peer-to-peer traffic. It will go from the standard def and the small file format, as you have it on YouTube, to high-definition eventually," he said.

Analyst Carmi Levy said Internet service providers have invested huge amounts of money in their networks and need technology to increase bandwidth that can work with what they already have in place.

"The doomsayers have been warning about an Internet apocalypse for years and magically that has not yet happened," said Levy, senior vice-president of strategic consulting at AR Communications in Toronto.

"Bandwidth will continue to grow to account for the increased demands of such bandwidth rich-applications like video," he said.

Nortel's Morin sees nothing but opportunity.

"I personally don't see any reason why this should stop even with the threat of an economic downturn."

Nortel has announced five contracts for the technology, including one in the United Kingdom and in Denmark but none in Canada has been announced yet. Morin also said Nortel has done a successful trial of 100G technology in Philadelphia with Comcast Corp., the largest U.S. cable operator.

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