Internet Congestion: Why It Matters and What To Do About it

In this digital era, prominent investors and tech companies are using new developments in artificial intelligence to improve customer experience. Among them is William Erbey, a serial entrepreneur who has started six successful multi-billion-dollar public companies.

Erbey has a background in statistics and is an investor in System73, which offers end-to-end content delivery solutions. Erbey has observed that streaming video’s widespread acceptance has become its greatest liability.

“With a compound annual growth rate of nearly 20%, streaming video faces strong headwinds, most notable is how collective demand affects streaming quality. As more people connect to watch and increasingly expect video quality to keep up with the latest formats like 4k, a more significant burden is placed on streaming infrastructure,” said Erbey.

Scaling: Where AI Excels

Erbey believes that AI-enhanced, Multi-CDN content distribution will provide viewers with high Quality of Experience even at peak viewing times. Without such technology, high traffic at peak viewing times causes considerable congestion and results in a poor Quality of Experience. According to Erbey “Not taking a holistic view of the internet results in a poor viewing experience for all.”

The current internet is very much hardware centric. Hardware solutions offer diminishing returns as internet traffic continues to grow. You’re limited to doing nothing more than throwing increasing amounts of hardware to solve growing internet bottlenecks. Think of these bottlenecks in terms of automobile traffic. There may be a longer but quicker route to your destination.

AI - augmented, Multi-CDNs can solve internet bottlenecks, in other words, congestion.

Erbey forecasts that AI – augmented, Multi-CDNs will predict internet capacity and traffic usage so that data can traverse under-utilized, non-gridlocked, internet resources assuring the highest Quality of Experience for viewers. Erbey told ZeroHedge, adding: “At its core, the current model is based on ideas that are 30 years old and painfully out of date for today’s reality.”

The model today is to change over CDNs after they are at capacity, triggering holdups to streaming, causing bad video quality for consumers. Congestion can be foreseen thanks to AI so that viewer traffic can be improved before a decrease in quality takes place.

Software, including AI, as opposed to hardware will allow the growth of video streaming to continue. Large-scale linear and live streaming events with perhaps hundreds of millions of people watching at the same time with 4K quality will be possible.

As Erbey put it “AI is still evolving, but we’ve seen measurable results in a relatively short period of time. We need to abandon the idea that simply throwing more money at a problem will fix it.”