It's easy: Just get involved with online audio and video. The other day I was using Skype to interview a source over the Internet when his voice suddenly became incomprehensible. The poor man sounded for all the world like Donald Duck! Somewhere along the line, servers were overloading from too much traffic.

Or try video. Because none of the cable channels carried the launch of the New Horizons mission to Pluto, I had to watch it over the Net on NASA TV. So did enough people that when the Atlas V rocket lifted off, its image paused above the framework of the launching site, jerked upwards once and then stopped altogether. Network congestion strikes again.

This kind of thing happens with live, streaming video such as my rocket launch. And it's getting to be even more of a problem when it comes to downloadable video files, because some of them can be huge, and providers are reluctant to cache them locally.

Enter peer-to-peer networking. An outfit called CacheLogic, which makes tools for streamlining network management, says that 60 percent of all Net traffic is in the form of peer-to-peer data swaps. That kind of thing drives Hollywood execs crazy, because it allows people to exchange TV shows, movies and music. Moreover, 60 percent of that swap traffic involves some kind of video content.

Peer-to-peer is intriguing technology. When a file is in heavy demand, the number of PCs trying to get it can overwhelm central servers. As an alternative, peer-to-peer options let people download the file from nearby computers but with the additional proviso that the people using the system must share the file upstream with others.

The user, in other words, also becomes a bandwidth provider, and as demand for a given file grows, the bandwidth to allow the download moves to where the demand is. It's fascinating to see that this technology, which has won the wrath of the entertainment industry (it's the old Napster model taken to its logical conclusion), is now under intense study by that same industry. After all, it's clear that delivering content over the Net is big business, and Hollywood has a stake in making sure that legally obtained content reaches consumers.

Thus we are seeing interesting solutions such as those offered by Las Vegas-based Itiva Digital Media (www.itiva.com). Itiva speeds up video delivery by breaking up gigantic files into parts that can be kept on the servers of local Net providers. Called "quanta," they are stored just like conventional Web pages.

Itiva calls its method "quantum streaming." Each part of a movie is broken into a small piece and reassembled at the viewer's end. Think of this solution as the peer-to-peer method legitimized and put to work by Internet service providers, lightening their loads while increasing the availability of multimedia content.

High-definition video over standard broadband? Early results are promising, and the company is looking for deals with movie studios to distribute their wares.

From an entirely different direction comes the open source Tribler system (www.tribler.org), which offers its own take on peer-to-peer.

The project intends to double the speed of today's Bittorrent protocol, the peer-to-peer method most commonly used on the Net and to provide additional tools. Peer-to-peer could use the tune-up. The Skype phone call I mentioned above used peer-to-peer methods with obvious problems.

But look for companies to push a variety of network speedup technologies as the demand for video and telephony over the Internet grows.

Need another sign of the times? CBS put NCAA games on the Net and drew more than 4 million visitors in the first four days of the tournament. It's clear that the Net has to become a better conduit, and fast.

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