In a long and interesting interview published in India’s Economic Times, the co-founder and chief scientist of the market’s leading content delivery network (CDN) says the Internet wasn’t built to handle the 35-billion devices now connected to it – many of them smartphones and other mobile devices.
Tom Leighton of Akamai says this growing use of the Internet will cause problems:
“It (the Internet) was not built for video. It was not built with mobile access in mind. It was not built for social networking and all the things we do today. And we use the same protocols more or less to run these applications, which will create network management and quality challenges.”
Our own tests at SEVEN echo this sentiment as traffic from the chatty Internet Protocol (IP) makes our list of the top five sources of the “hidden traffic” that adds to bandwidth and signaling challenges.
The solution, Leighton admits, might include moving from IP to another protocol, but he acknowledges that may be too large a change to actually take place.
Next best are solutions like mobile CDNs (for Akamai) and traffic optimization (from SEVEN) that will eliminate a lot of the problem caused by increased mobile users on a network that isn’t optimized for this type of use.
blog.seven.com 