Start-up companies plan to speed up the Net
By John Borland and Corey Grice
Staff Writers, CNET News.com
August 5, 1999, 4:00 a.m. PT
The trouble with a high-speed Internet connection
is that the Net itself often isn't very fast.
After years of hype, cable modems and telephone
companies' digital subscriber lines (DSL) are finally
making substantial inroads into consumer
households. But even these turbocharged
connections have an Achilles heel--if 2 million
people try to download the latest Star Wars movie
trailer at the same time, traffic jams on the Internet
become a bottleneck, slowing down each user's
connection speeds.
Enter a new breed of company, which aims to bring
the most popular content on the Web as close as
possible to the user, eliminating the slowdowns
created by passing the content through clogged
Internet pipes. Using satellite feeds, content caching
servers, traffic-routing software, and other
technology, companies such as Akamai,
SkyCache, and Edgix are vying to colonize what
they call the "edge" of the Net with Web content.
FULL TEXT @
technews.netscape.com |
