I suspect it is. After several years of wild investment and plenty of managementally-challenged dotcoms throwing their oar in, we're now going through a period of "structural realignment". In other words, all the infrastructure that was built in the boom years is gradually falling to bits and nobody's got the cash or the skills to repair it. A bit like a coal-mining town in the late 80s, or perhaps the road outside my house when the council ran out of cash. No, I like the first analogy better. Anyway...

An accusation's no good without examples, so here are mine. First, IT Reviews had to move to a new hosting company in late January after our old one, Virtual Internet, suddenly turned crap after four years of relatively faithful and reliable service. And I mean really crap. Despite a plea from them to "give us one more week, we'll sort it out", towards the end the server hosting IT Reviews was so unreliable that 20 percent of visitors to the site would never have managed to read any of the reviews. We'd have been better off with a 286 connected to the Web via a piece of string and two empty tin cans.

Also, some of you will have noticed that we had a link to a broadband Internet company on this site, arranged through an affiliate company. But the link broke a few days ago and the affiliate company has totally failed to fix it, or even reply to e-mails. So we've had to remove the link.

This is happening everywhere, often on a much larger scale. I believe it's because none of the dotcom-reliant companies can afford to pay decent salaries to their technical staff (share options? No thanks), so the staff go to larger, established, non-dotcom companies where they can be paid what they're worth. The UK government's idea to give 'green cards' to IT-literate immigrants isn't going to solve the skills shortage, because there isn't a skills shortage. The skills exist, but nobody's prepared (or able?) to pay for them; rates for IT contractors and full-time staff have plummeted over the past year.

Why does this matter to you? Because it affects services right across the board. There are few aspects of modern life that aren't now inextricably linked to the Internet. And if the Internet starts to crumble because there's no money to pay the people who maintain it, we're all in trouble. If you're regularly placed on hold because "all of our technical staff are unusually busy" - as usual - you'll know what I mean.

So where now for Broadband Britain? Better start collecting those tin cans and string.