At the backbone level, the report suggests serving content from locations as close as possible to the requester and optimizing routing. Adding more servers to deal with peak demands results in those servers sitting idle during periods of low demand. Bandwidth is like real estate in Hawaii, there's never enough and the price is always rising. To keep up with demand, content providers are turning to intelligent solutions like caching, load balancing, and bandwidth management to relieve network congestion. 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.