To keep up with demand, content providers are turning to intelligent solutions like caching, load balancing, and bandwidth management to relieve network congestion. Caching technology stores the most frequently requested portions of a Web site on a separate server that is as close as possible to the requesting user. Local Internet storage caching is less expensive than network retransmission by about 40 percent per year. While not all Internet traffic is cachable, as much as 50 percent of the majority of all Internet content is cachable. Since many Web sites these days are made up of clusters of servers, load balancing, which works by routing requests to the server within that cluster with the most available capacity, is another way of helping to speed things up a bit.
Congestion occurring at the backbone level is due to an inherent flaw in the architecture.
Backbone congestion Because the money is in making one's own network run better and not in Internet efficiency as a whole, backbone providers want to get rid of data packets not bound for their own customers as soon as possible. That means they dump packets at the nearest point without regard for eventual destination or network congestion. Solutions to the problem of backbone bottlenecks are concentrated around trying to avoid the public Internet network as much as possible. Companies like Cidera, iBeam, and Akamai are examples of companies using this approach to making things faster. InterNAP approaches the network congestion problem through an optimized routing solution.