American business and technology experts are voicing fears that the widespread arrival of Apple's iPad device could threaten the country's national infrastructure, as it might not be able to cope with greater demand from device users.

Information Week has reported that government officials have already voiced such concerns, and quotes Phil Bellaria, the director of scenario planning for the federal government’s Omnibus Broadband initiative as saying: “With the iPad pointing to even greater demand for mobile broadband on the horizon, we must ensure that network congestion doesn’t choke off a service that consumers clearly find so appealing or frustrate mobile broadband’s ability to keep us competitive in the global broadband economy.”

With just one company, AT&T, licensed to provide network services for the iPhone and now, the iPad, Bellaria believes that the US could experience a repeat of the scenario of the mid-1990s, when AOL first launched unlimited dial-up broadband services.

In his Information Week blog, Ed Hansberry recalls: “I had a number of friends and co-workers that were unable to get online for days at a time, and even when they could get on, they risked being knocked off during their session.”

And although he is hopeful that AT&T will this time be better equipped to cope, he believes that the company could alienate subscribers if they do experience problems with their broadband service: “I don’t see a national crisis in the making, but I can see frustration levels grow for current AT&T subscribers as precious bandwidth has to be shared with another device that will likely demand more data per device than the iPhone does.”