It's hard to imagine the world’s information superhighway choked, like the traffic on Bangalore's Airport Road.

In the second coming of the Internet, popularly referred to as Web 2.0, companies are developing innovative tools to enhance user experience, with the underlying theme of empowering users like you and me to "connect, share and collaborate" over the world wide web. The pace of innovation has been phenomenal and exciting.
What's interesting is that progress in the Web 2.0 sphere, especially over the last couple of years has been available to consumers at a low price. This was made possible owing to the speculative overbuilding during the bubble era. The massive overcapacity created then, which had made bandwidth cheap and abundant, is now being
consumed.

It is likely that global traffic will exceed the Internet's capacity by end of this year. Why? The rapid growth in the number of global Internet users, combined with the rise of online video services and the lack of investment in new infrastructure is clogging the web's arteries. Advanced networks cost billions of dollars to deploy and need to generate predictable revenue to make business sense. So who will improve, expand and bulk up the Internet needs to be seen. Unless substantial investments are pumped in to upgrade the infrastructure, download speeds could crawl to a standstill.

In this issue, we bring to you Akamai, a company that has been working all through the past decade, trying to ensure that traffic runs smoothly on the information superhighway. We talk to the leaders at Akamai about their strategies to avoid congestion of the Internet traffic and see their evolution as the landscape changes.

Like always, you'll find informative stories and thought-provoking ideas in our pages. We appreciate your time and look forward to your feedback.

Pradeep Shankar
editor@thesmarttechie.com