Video calling, we've said, will be a large component of the Internet data traffic surge we call the exaflood. After a decade or two of false starts, consumer video chats began in large volume over the last year or so -- by mid-2007 Microsoft Video Calling was generating 4 petabytes per month of data traffic, equal to the entire Net of 1997. Now business video conferencing is taking off as well, with telepresence systems from Cisco and HP just coming online.

only about 1,000 of the 176,000 videoconferencing systems sold world-wide in 2007 were telepresence systems, estimates market researcher TeleSpan Publishing Corp. But unit sales of the high-end systems were up five-fold from the 200 sold in 2006, and the number should triple to 3,000 in 2008, TeleSpan estimates.