Posts Tagged: "Tom Leighton"

Content Delivery Networks: Dan Lewin and Tom Leighton solve the “World Wide Wait”

Content delivery networks (CDNs), distributed networks involving proxy servers and data centers to provide high availability of content, are becoming increasingly valuable as Internet users continue to demand instant access to files or streaming media… Currently, the world’s largest CDN is Akamai, a CDN and cloud services provider based in Cambridge, MA, which operates 216,000 servers across 120 countries and within more than 1,500 networks to deliver up to 30 percent of Internet traffic worldwide. The success of Akamai’s business is largely based on the foundation of an innovative leap in Internet architecture developed by a professor and a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Both Tom Leighton and Daniel Lewin are members of the 2017 class inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Today, August 22nd, marks the 17th anniversary of the issue of the patent for which Leighton and Lewin have been recognized as major pioneers in the field of CDNs. The work of both of these innovators continues to serve as a basis for perhaps the most successful firm in the CDN space currently.