Internet is scaling faster than today’s infrastructure can keep up

The Internet is scaling faster than current infrastructure can keep up. Here is why we care and what we’re going to do about it.

Greta.io is a Swedish company, and our vision is to upgrade the Internet for everyone, everywhere. This is how we see the future of the Internet and how we can improve that future.

Right now, one thing is abundantly clear. Over the past 25 years, the Internet has evolved by leaps and bounds. It started as a small network of connected university servers where researchers shared text documents, and it transformed into one of the most critical building blocks of modern democratic societies.

For example, access to the Internet accelerates the formation of new ideas.
It boosts economic growth. It provides useful knowledge and information to people around the world every single day. It enables you to meet people who would be otherwise impossible to find. It allows journalists to spread important facts. And it democratizes culture and education, taking them out of the hands of a privileged few.

Now here’s the technical challenge that threatens to undermine it all:
Those initial researchers and early architects of the Internet couldn’t possibly predict the scale and impact this network would eventually have.

As a result, the Internet just isn’t built to handle the enormous amount of data that is being distributed between billions of people and devices today.

Continuously increasing bandwidth needs put immense pressure on already strained and fragile infrastructure. And many of the current fixes have been duct taped on instead of driven by innovation.

To date, the predominant way of expanding the network has been through new investments in old solutions. Companies in North America and Western Europe have invested billions of dollars in burying cables in the ground, laying cables across the sea floor, and building data centers in the suburbs of western cities.

Yet problems such as network congestion, service downtime,
and performance issues stemming from a shortage of capacity are still part of the everyday Internet experience. We sometimes experience those as buffering during live streaming events, and delayed news sites during critical moments.

That’s the state of the Internet today.

Now here’s where we see it going.

Over the next five to ten years, the most rapid growth of Internet consumption and distribution will be seen in parts of the world where the current infrastructure hasn’t even caught up to the ailing status quo.

The population in cities such as Nairobi and Mumbai are now demanding access to the same types of experiences that Internet users have learned to take for granted in the western world. And they shouldn’t have to wait for another 25 years for sufficient infrastructure to be put into place.

The picture doesn’t end there.

Not only is there explosive exponential growth in the number of people connecting to the Internet, but we are also facing a massive increase in the number of connected devices each person controls.

By 2020, the numbers will be truly impressive.

Cisco predicts that the number of devices connected to IP networks will be more than three times the global population. Every second, a million minutes of video content will cross the network. And VR and video will continue to represent an ever-growing portion of our content consumption.

The writing on the wall is clear: Internet infrastructure is facing substantial scale and performance challenges today, and those challenges will continue to grow over the next five to ten years.

We founded Greta.io because we realized we could develop intelligent technology to help overcome these challenges.

So that’s what we did.

Our technology enables developers and companies to provide substantially faster and better end-user experiences without costly upgrades to the underlying infrastructure of the network itself.

Our approach utilizes technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to unlock enormous optimization gains. We create intelligent data routing based on global network data.

This is fundamental in building a dynamic network and provides a sustainable alternative to the old model of scaling by investing in static infrastructure. Our approach means that you can utilize existing infrastructure in a much smarter way. It allows the network to grow organically based on demand.

There is a tremendous opportunity in front of all of us today, because the Internet is nowhere close to being a “done deal.”

Over half of the world’s population is still waiting to get connected. New devices and content formats are waiting to get invented and explored.

At Greta.io, we are passionate about this development, and we’re determined to find the optimal way to distribute all of that data.

Greta.io is dedicated to helping users increase site performance via an innovative approach to content delivery. We use machine learning to make content routing decisions in the client based on real-time network data. For every piece of content, Greta automatically decides if the content should be delivered over multi-CDN, peer-to-peer, client cache or an overlay network. As a result, customers experience shorter content load times, higher content quality and server offload during peak traffic.