LAS VEGAS — With a growing number of connected screens, streaming services having risen above local playback and the demands of UltraHD video looming, internet infrastructure is being sorely tested.
Akamai and Qualcomm think one solution is to cache popular digital content in the home or office. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Qualcomm’s Atheros showed off its IPQ “smart gateway”, a router device running Akamai software which “prepositions” bandwidth-heavy content.
That’s engineer speak for intelligently cacheing files so that users beyond the “last mile” (ie. a home or workplace) need not call on the live internet multiple times to download.
“We all know how painful it is when that new big update comes out from iOS or Android … or it’s primetime between 4pm and 9pm and everyone’s trying to get access to their videos or play their games,” Akamai chief strategist Kris Alexander tells Beet.TV.
“You can have your movies, all your software updates, the latest games all there and not have to go all the way back up to the internet … You have immediate access to all of this. It can provide a lot of benefits to the ISPs and carriers.”
Akamai is betting hard-pressed internet networks will be keen to push repetitious distribution out to groups of users themselves, to avoid multiple transmissions an save bandwidth as the demands from higher-resolution uses grows.
