3.7
CASESTUDY Akamai Technologies: When
Demand Exceeds Capacity
In 2011, the amount of Internet traffic generated by YouTube alone is greater than the
amount of traffic on the entire Internet in 2000. By 2015, the digital equivalent of all
the movies ever made will cross over the Internet every five minutes. In the last year,
Netflix’s subscriber base jumped over 50% to 16 million, most of whom are now
streaming movies over the Internet, and they now account for 20% of all Internet
traffic in the United States. Because of video streaming and the explosion in mobile
devices demanding high-bandwidth applications, Internet traffic has increased 800%
since 2006, and is predicted to expand four times by 2015. Internet video is now 40%
of Internet traffic and will reach 62% by 2015, according to networking giant Cisco
Systems. Mobile platform traffic from smartphones and Wi-Fi devices is growing at
60% and will soon push cell networks and the Internet to their capacities. Cisco
estimates that annual global Internet traffic will hit nearly 1 zettabyte in 2015—that’s
1,000 exabytes, or, in other words, 10 with 19 zeroes behind it!
Experts call applications like Netflix, YouTube, and high definition streaming video
services “net bombs” because they threaten the effective operation of the Internet. At
some point, demand will exceed capacity, and either there will be “brownouts” where
everyone’s connection speed slows down or “capping” of bandwidth hogs (those 10%
of Internet users who consume 60% of the Internet’s capacity because of extensive
video downloading).
Analysts differ on how fast Internet capacity is growing. Large telecommunication
companies (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Level3) argue that demand will
overwhelm capacity by 2015, while other experts argue that Internet bandwidth can
double every year for a very long time, and easily keep up with demand. Perhaps
they’re both right: Internet capacity can expand to keep up with demand if sufficient
capital is invested in backbone and local networks. That’s a big “if.” As a result, and
in order to raise capital, nearly all the large ISPs such as Comcast, Charter, Cox, and
AT&T have bandwidth caps in place where heavy users of video are charged more
for their Internet service. More charges based on usage are in the pipeline.
Is Internet bandwidth capacity doubling every year? The proof is in the pudding. How
fast have your home or office bandwidth connections grown in the last year? Chances
are, your Internet connect speed has not changed in several years. Over 1.1 million
people online watched the U.S. soccer team beat Algeria in the 2010 World Cup, the
largest online sports event in history. Many viewers reported dropped frames,
interrupted video, and poor coordination of video and audio. On January 20, 2009, the
Internet experienced an unheralded meltdown that generally escaped public notice or
concern. It was the inauguration day of Barack Obama in Washington, D.C. More
than 10 million people tried to watch the event on the Internet, but many were not
able to view the live video feed because the Internet did not have the capacity to
handle the traffic. Not only did 3 million users not receive any video, but many of the
7 million who were able to establish a connection were treated to burpy audio, freezeframe video, and lost backgrounds. Cable and broadcast television viewers had no
problem. Today you can check your bandwidth capacity by looking carefully at
movies that you stream at home. On a busy Friday or Saturday night, the average
Internet home viewer will experience stuttering video and sound. This is hardly the
stuff of a bright future for mass audience video over the Web.
In today’s broadband environment, the threshold of patience is probably much lower
than even a few seconds. Increased video and audio customer expectations are bad
news for anyone seeking to use the Web for delivery of high-quality multimedia
content such as CD-quality music and high definition video. If you are SIRIUS/XM
Radio and you want to stream online music to several million users a day, you will
definitely need some help. If you are MTV and want to stream music videos to your
10 million viewers online, or Apple iTunes and want to download music or video
files to your 225 million online customers, you will also need some help. Akamai is
one of the Web’s major helpers, and each of the preceding companies, along with
most of the Web’s top companies, use Akamai’s services to speed the delivery of
content. Akamai serves over 1 million simultaneous media streams on a typical day.
Slow-loading Web pages and Web content—from music to video—sometimes result
from poor design, but more often than not, the problem stems from the underlying
infrastructure of the Internet. As you have learned in this chapter, the Internet was
originally developed to carry text-based e-mail messages among a relatively small
group of researchers, not bandwidth-hogging graphics, sound, and video files to tens
of millions of people all at once. The Internet is a collection of networks that has to
pass information from one network to another. Sometimes the handoff is not smooth.
Every 1,500-byte packet of information sent over the Internet must be verified by the
receiving server and an acknowledgment sent to the sender. This slows down not only
the distribution of content such as music, but also slows down interactive requests,
such as purchases, that require the client computer to interact with an online shopping
cart. Moreover, each packet may go through many different servers on its way to its
final destination, multiplying by several orders of magnitude the number of
acknowledgments required to move a packet from New York to San Francisco. The
Internet today spends much of its time and capacity verifying packets, contributing to
a problem called “latency” or delay. For this reason, a single e-mail with a 1
megabyte attached PDF file can create over 50 megabytes of Internet traffic and data
storage on servers, client hard drives, and network back up drives.
Akamai (which means intelligent, clever, or “cool” in Hawaiian) Technologies was
founded by Tom Leighton, an MIT professor of applied mathematics, and Daniel
Lewin, an MIT grad student, with the idea of expediting Internet traffic to overcome
these limitations. When Timothy Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web,
realized that congestion on the Internet was becoming an enormous problem, he
issued a challenge to Leighton’s research group to invent a better way to deliver
Internet content. The result was a set of breakthrough algorithms that became the
basis for Akamai. Lewin received his master’s degree in electrical engineering and
computer science in 1998. His master’s thesis was the theoretical starting point for the
company. It described storing copies of Web content such as pictures or video clips at
many different locations around the Internet so that one could always retrieve a
nearby copy, making Web pages load faster.
Officially launched in August 1998, Akamai’s products include Digital Asset
Solutions such as Akamai HD Network, which enables Web sites to deliver an online
HD experience, Dynamic Site Solutions, which speed up the delivery of rich
interactive content, and Application Performance Solutions, a suite of services that
allows corporations to maximize their Web performance. Akamai’s products allow
customers to move their Web content closer to end users so a user in New York City,
for instance, will be served L.L.Bean pages from the New York Metro area Akamai
servers, while users of the L.L.Bean site in San Francisco will be served pages from
Akamai servers in San Francisco. According to Akamai, 85% of the world’s Internet
users are within a single network “hop” of an Akamai server. Akamai has a wide
range of large corporate and government clients: 1 out of every 3 global Fortune 500
companies, 90 of the top 100 online U.S. retailers, all branches of the U.S. military,
all of the top Internet portals, all the major U.S. sports leagues, and so on. Akamai has
over 95,000 computer servers on nearly 1,900 networks in 71 countries around the
world. In 2011, Akamai delivers between 15% and 30% of all Web traffic, and
hundreds of billions of daily Internet interactions. Other competitors in the content
delivery network (CDN) industry include Blue Coat, Limelight, Savvis, and Mirror
Image Internet.
Accomplishing this seemingly simple task requires that Akamai monitor the entire
Internet, locating potential sluggish areas and devising faster routes for information to
travel. Frequently used portions of a client’s Web site, or large video or audio files
that would be difficult to send to users quickly, are stored on Akamai’s 95,000 servers
around the world. When a user requests a song or a video file, his or her request is
redirected to an Akamai server nearby and the content served from this local server.
Akamai’s servers are placed in Tier 1 backbone supplier networks, large ISPs,
universities, and other networks. Akamai’s software determines which server is
optimum for the user and then transmits the “Akamaized” content locally. Web sites
that are “Akamaized” can be delivered anywhere from 4 to 10 times as fast as nonAkamaized content. Akamai has developed a number of other business services based
on its Internet savvy, including content targeting of advertising based on user location
and zip code, content security, business intelligence, disaster recovery, on-demand
bandwidth, and computing capacity during spikes in Internet traffic in partnership
with IBM, storage, global traffic management, and streaming services. Akamai also
offers a product line called Advertising Decision Solutions, which provides
companies with intelligence generated by the Internet’s most accurate and
comprehensive knowledge base of Internet network activity. Akamai’s massive server
deployment and relationships with networks throughout the world enable optimal
collection of geography and bandwidth-sensing information. As a result, Akamai
provides a highly accurate knowledge base with worldwide coverage. Customers
integrate a simple program into their Web server or application server. This program
communicates with the Akamai database to retrieve the very latest information. The
Akamai network of servers is constantly mapping the Internet, and at the same time,
each company’s software is in continual communication with the Akamai network.
The result: data is always current. Advertisers can deliver ads based on country,
region, city, market area, area code, county, zip code, connection type, and speed.
You can see several interesting visualizations of the Internet that log basic real-time
Web activity by visiting the Akamai Web site and clicking on “Data Visualizations.”
As impressive as Akamai’s operation has become, it is not nearly enough to cope
with the next 10 years of Internet growth, which is expected to be over 100% a year.
It’s unclear that government authorities in the United States or elsewhere are aware of
the serious imbalance between the demand for Internet services and capacity. The
Obama administration has pledged to double broadband wireless Internet capacity in
the next 10 years. Even if successful, the effort would be totally inadequate because
Internet mobile traffic is expected to quadruple in four years. Private industry will not
be able to meet Internet demands either unless it can successfully charge customers
for the bandwidth they use rather than charge a flat fee for all users regardless of how
much capacity they use. Proponents of “net neutrality” oppose industry demands to
charge for usage, and the FTC is resisting efforts by industry to charge for usage. The
proponents of net neutrality include some heavy hitters like Google, Microsoft, AOL,
and Yahoo, all of whom want their customers to think the Internet is “free” no matter
what is clicked on. The last thing Google wants is for users to hesitate when thinking
about viewing a YouTube video because they might have to pay for the experience.
In an ominous sign of the disconnect between Washington and industry, Verizon
halted a $23 billion build-out of its fiber-optic network to homes (FiOS) for fear they
would not be able to recover their costs unless they could charge customers for the
amount of bandwidth they use. Without charging for Internet use based on bandwidth
consumed by customers, Internet capacity will be overwhelmed by demand in the
foreseeable future despite the efforts of firms like Akamai.
SOURCES: “Facts & Figures,” Akamai.com, August 23, 2011; “The State of the Internet, 1st Quarter
2011 Report,” by Akamai Technologies, Inc., July 26, 2011; “Cisco Visual Networking Index, 20102015,” Cisco Systems, Inc., June 1, 2011; “Internet Data Caps Cometh,” by Holman Jenkins, Wall
Street Journal, May 11, 2011; “Wider Streets for Internet Traffic,” by Anne Eisenberg, New York
Times, October 9, 2010; “Google TV, Apple TV, and Roku’s Biggest Enemy: A Lack of Internet
Bandwidth,” by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, zdnet.com, October 8, 2010; “Obama Pledges to Increase
Internet Capacity,” by Stephanie Kirschgassener, FT.com, June 29, 2010; “ESPN3.com’s World Cup
Coverage: A Bit Choppy, But There,” Appscout.com, June 11, 2010.
(Traver 186-190)
Traver, Kenneth Laudon and Carol G. E-Commerce 2012, 8/e for DeVry University.
Pearson Learning Solutions, 10/2012. VitalBook file.
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