Do you remember when . . .

. . . not that long ago, all the investment articles in the business section of the newspaper, saying that we'd overbuilt our telecommunications infrastructure, and that there was not enough demand to pay for all the bandwidth that was becoming available? That coin has now flipped:

The Internet needs a massive investment to keep up with the demands of YouTube fans, billions of e-mails and wireless access, a university study states.

If the network that carries Internet traffic were a highway, it would be as if every car owner, "rushed out and traded in their cars for massive 20-wheel trucks," stated the report from University of California-San Diego Professor Michael Kleeman, a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication.

In the report, titled "Point of Disconnect," Kleeman writes that there needs to be a massive expansion of network capacity in the United States, and even though network operators are making those investments, it still may not be enough to keep up with demand.

Of course, everyone who followed the advice to dump telecommunications stocks took a bath on the transaction, but that's one of the risks of any kind of investing: if you don't know what you're investing in, you'll end up lining the pockets of those who do know.