We burden our computers with too much overhead. Remember the early days of the Web, when browsers sputtered under the weight of slow dial-up connections? Today's high bandwidth offers much more, but all too often I encounter Web sites so complicated by add-ons that today's performance via cable or DSL is more reminiscent of those early dial-up days than service providers like to admit.

Click and wait while multimedia ads gear up to run and your pop-up blocker goes crazy. In the days before the high-tech bubble burst on Wall Street, people talked about an insatiable demand for bandwidth. The problem is, the bandwidth is there; the issue is how we use it.

If we keep seeing wireless, for example, as a conduit for content like movies and music, we'll anger an audience whose basic need is to communicate. As I said in an earlier column, give me better voice quality on my cell phone and forget streaming video.

Andrew Odlyzko, who heads the University of Minnesota's Digital Technology Center, points out that wireless is a technology that is re-establishing its roots. The earliest days of radio were dominated by point-to-point communications, but the medium then moved into a broadcast model that persists today. But look at the development of cellular services, whose revenue far exceed those of radio broadcasting. Connectivity, says Odlyzko, always trumps content distribution; most people do not need a movie screen on their phones.

It's striking how poorly many content providers read today's market. The biggest computer trend I can see is the one they're ignoring: the massive growth of storage. I would think the fact that hard-disk storage had increased a thousand-fold in the last decade would be front-page news in the tech world. It will force changes in our concept of content delivery, and probably demolish the notion that the Internet will become dominated by streaming video.

How? Look what's happening on top of your television. Digital video recorders are proliferating, offering the ability to record onto hard disks. A Sanyo DVR I just looked at offers a 300 GB hard disk that can record for four weeks continuously, and it is no secret that storage prices continue to drop. Indeed, the days of the 1 terabyte (1,000 GB) home computer -- using a hot new technology called perpendicular magnetic recording -- are not that far off.

In that environment, does it really make sense to set up a dual track for the Internet, as some content providers are now arguing, on the basis that live video delivery requires special handling? A two-tier Internet that charges for preferential data handling is objectionable on many grounds, not the least of which is that the best way to distribute video (this is another Odlyzko insight) will doubtless become fast file transfers to our gigantic hard disks, for later distribution through home networks to TVs and other devices.

No special treatment there (although video conferencing and other business services will still be delivered in live format). Instead of streaming video delivered to your phone's tiny screen, how about file transfers that let you watch the movie at your convenience without the extra tariff that will result from special data handling? Couple a good DVR with a DVD recorder, and you've got a system that can save any content you buy and that relies only on local storage.

A few companies are experimenting with a similar model for Web pages. Consider Webaroo, a Bellevue, Wash.-based company whose ultimate goal is to squeeze the Web into about 40 GB of pages (www.webaroo.com). For now, it offers topic-based packages of Web content ideal for those without continuous Web connectivity; when the software senses a connection is present, it updates its pages. Cheap storage is here a substitute for bandwidth and, frankly, the annoyances of dealing with connectivity delays as pages load.

Just how we use our massive and growing storage capabilities will be the story of the next ten years, and that fact should give a powerful boost to peer-to-peer technologies that let us download by tapping the disks of numerous computers simultaneously. There's abundant opportunity for financial growth in distributing content here, but companies that persist in the streaming-video model, especially in the wireless realm, aren't likely to achieve it.