"You can see the Internet as a self-regulating supply-and-demand mechanism," Froutan said. "The more people use it, the slower it gets, so the less people use it. If 10,000 people go to a site that normally supports 100 users, 9,000 will give up, while the other thousand will get very slow connectivity but will keep going until they get the job done."

At some point, people who need the Internet will start working after midnight, when there's less traffic, he predicted, and corporations will start paying premiums to the carriers to make sure their traffic gets through.

"If the problem persists long term, the carriers may drop some customers in order to service the ones that pay extra, and we will be left with a patchwork of private Internets," Froutan added.

"A pandemic will not bring down the Internet the least little bit, but there will be local problems," said Eric Paulak, an analyst at Gartner Inc. Corporations that plan to rely on telecommuting should act now, before an emergency, to reserve sufficient inbound bandwidth, he said.

"If you have a third of your people working from home, you will see your bandwidth requirements tripling," Paulak said, noting that a virtual private network will take about 250Kbit/sec. per user. Rather than pay upfront for the tripling, he suggested getting "shadow service," with reserved bandwidth that costs about 25 percent of a live connection. There are also burstable connections, where the rated connection speed represents the maximum or burst speed and the user pays only for what is actually used.