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Some day, instead of talking on the telephone to your kids, you’ll talk to them face-to-face – through your phone.

No joke, the day is coming for that to be second nature, says Michael Eggley, CEO of Iowa Network Services Inc. (INS). Someday we might be “always on,” constantly connected to the Internet from our location. Furthermore, the individual things we own – our TVs, coffee makers and lights, for example – could all be connected to the Web, ready for us to manipulate from wherever we are.

But the question is, will Iowa’s network be able to handle the exponentially increasing demand?

That’s Eggley’s job as CEO of a company that delivers telecommunications services by way of local Iowa telephone companies to more than 500,000 individuals and businesses, and it’s the reason INS took a step back and compiled an internal report released last Tuesday titled “The State of the Internet in Iowa.”

The report analyzed the current state of the Internet and also examined how it will evolve over the next 10 years, so that INS could be better prepared to meet the demand.

As an Internet service provider, INS essentially has large pipes with fiber-optic connections to the worldwide Internet backbone. Every video downloaded to your computer through Netflix, for example, must travel through the network INS has in place.

Demand, though, is growing at a dramatic rate. According to a report by Cisco Systems Inc., the amount of capacity used by 10 homes in 2012 will be equivalent to the entire Internet of 1995. By 2020, INS expects it will be required to deliver 1 terabyte per second connectivity to the Internet. By comparison, INS in early 2009 upgraded its Ethernet ring to 10 gigabits from a single gigabit. The first system developed by INS in 1993 originally consisted of eight modems that ran on a 56 kilobyte connection to the Internet’s backbone.

“There is an assumption that demand will just kind of continue on this hockey-stick growth that it has been on for years and years and years. There is no reason to think (it won’t continue),” Eggley said.

The good news is, bandwidth is virtually unlimited; INS just has to build it.

“By using the colors concept in optical fiber, the amount of bandwidth that is available to us, as long as you are willing to add the capacity to it, it almost feels pretty unlimited at this point,” said Tony Mumm, INS’s manager of product development.

Currently, Mumm said, the evolution beyond 10 gigabyte connections has companies looking into 40 gigabyte and 100 gigabyte versions. Regardless, it will be up to INS to stay in front of demand to ensure that Iowans can continue to fully utilize the multiple uses for the Internet that will sprout up in the coming years.

“In the late ’90s, you were viewing by today’s standard very rudimentary Web pages, with small images that didn’t require a lot of bandwidth or capacity,” Mumm said. “Nowadays you are into high multimedia that have a certain amount of need that drives demand that we are meeting. So what is the next thing that comes out? Is it 3-D TV over the Internet? Or teleportation? I mean, who knows? That is when we will have to be ready for that next tier and to grow when that is needed.”

Teleportation sure would be nice. Then you really could talk to your kids face-to-face – whenever you want.