Operation Freeflow comes to the Net

No one could accuse Akamai, a US start-up company, of modest goals

No one could accuse Akamai, a US start-up company, of modest goals. It plans to add a new communications layer to the Internet to speed the delivery of Web content worldwide.

Akamai - the name is a Hawaiian term for "cool" - was founded last year by mathematicians from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and recently attracted $8 million of venture capital. Its first service, FreeFlow, is in beta test by some of the world's largest websites. Akamai says it can speed up Web content delivery to users anywhere in the world, without recipients having to add expensive hardware or faster communications lines.

"It's not just the large websites that will benefit from FreeFlow but also Fortune 1000 websites," says Paul Sagan, Akamai's chief operating officer. "Websites are increasingly important for companies and they serve to support their brand. They cannot afford to have a slow website or be unable to handle sudden increases in the number of users."

FreeFlow is essentially a network of hundreds of inexpensive computers working as proxy servers around the world. Proxy servers are already widely used by companies or Internet service providers to store frequently accessed content closer to users. Managed Webwide proxying is another matter.

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If large numbers of users on the east coast of the US request weather information from a site on the west coast, for example, the FreeFlow network will detect the demand and move content to servers located closer to those users. About 400 FreeFlow servers are in operation and the company plans to have 1,000 in place by the end of this year.

FreeFlow also monitors data traffic across the Internet, computing ways to deliver information through the fastest possible routes. This network intelligence is distributed across the FreeFlow network and does not reside in a central location, making it much more responsive to changing conditions.

Another element of the service is "flash crowd protection". This means that a site can handle virtually a limitless number of users without crashing or slowing because FreeFlow will make additional copies that can be accessed from multiple servers. Flash crowd protection is a problem for many websites. Adding extra capacity for occasional busy times is expensive. Yet being unprepared for large numbers of users results in lost business.

"One of the tests we have run on FreeFlow is on the Starr report, which overloaded many news websites," says Sagan. "What we have done is taken the traffic load experienced by one of the top news websites and increased it six-fold and ran it for more than two weeks. FreeFlow handled this without problems.

"The secret of FreeFlow is the algorithms developed by the founders of Akamai," he added. Akamai's patent-protected algorithms were developed by MIT researchers led by Frank Thomson Leighton, professor of applied mathematics and now the company's chief scientist. FreeFlow will be available as a commercial service later this year and, although the US is the first target market, it will be offered in Europe and Asia by the end of this year.

"What FreeFlow offers is the first regional approach to delivery of web-based content," says Sagan. "Newspapers have regional printing plants and TV stations have local affiliates that beam out programmes, yet the Web still uses a provincial model sending content all over the world from one location to deliver content worldwide. FreeFlow changes that."