There’s a growing debate over whether the Internet’s current infrastructure is sufficient to handle the explosion of bandwidth-hungry services such as Internet telephony and video.

In a recent report, Cisco calculated that monthly Internet traffic in North America will increase 264 percent by 2011 to more than 7.8 million terabytes, or the equivalent of 40 trillion email messages. If such Internet traffic continues increasing, many believe networks could crash or at least slow to a crawl.

To tackle the problem, a slew of start-ups are producing gear and software to accelerate Internet traffic or to increase the network’s capacity.