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Jan 30 2017 at 8:16 AM Updated Jan 30 2017 at 8:16 AM

Akamai CEO warns NBN won't fix internet speeds, and sees rapidgrowth in cyber threats

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Akamai CEO Dr Tom Leighton has a bird's eye view of internet use, and warns about congestion. Paul Jeffers

The head of one of the world's biggest internet infrastructure

companies has warned Australians not to expect the national

broadband network to bring an end to the misery of slow internet

speeds.

Speaking to The Australian Financial Review on a visit to

Australia, chief executive and co-founder of $US16 billion content

delivery network (CDN) and cloud services giant Akamai, Dr Tom Leighton said

despite the billions of dollars invested in the NBN, Australians would still be reliant on

telcos like Telstra and Optus continuing to invest in their infrastructure to head off the

congestion caused by greater usage.

Akamai has a box seat watching the use of the internet, it serves up almost 30 per

cent of all online content consumed globally, with its CDNs being deployed by telcos

in vast data centres to store and distribute content, such as live sports coverage or TV

streaming without unwatchable lag times.

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Dr Leighton says the effectiveness of the NBN will be reliant on the infrastructure of companies like Telstra. PaulJeffers

The government has copped regular criticism for basing the NBN on copper-reliant

fibre to the node, rather than the previously preferred and technically superior fibre

to the premise technology, and Dr Leighton said Australian consumers would need

telcos to keep up investment to ensure speeds didn't go backwards despite the

upgraded national infrastructure.

Without such investment he warned that internet traffic becomes like an eight-lane

freeway that connects to a country lane.

"[Faster internet] is not just a matter of making the last mile better. The issue is how

the videos and content are being delivered and how the network is architected," he

said.

"With high bandwidth connections to the home, people think the internet quality will

get better, but in fact the reverse often happens because you get congestion in the

core of the network."

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Tim Berners-Lee inventor of the World Wide Web was an early colleague of Dr Leighton.

The amount of data Australians are downloading is continuing to increase

significantly, thanks in part to the introduction of TV streaming services such

as Netflix and Stan to the local market.

The most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that in the three months

to June 30, 2016, 2.1 million terabytes were downloaded, with the majority still

occurring via fixed line broadband. This was up 22.3 per cent on the previous

corresponding period.

With numerous predictions of an impending explosion in the number of connected

devices – the so-called internet of things (IoT) – concerns are rising that Australia's

infrastructure will not be able to cope.

For companies like Akamai, which seek to optimise the performance of existing

infrastructure, this offers commercial opportunities, and Dr Leighton said the

company was upping its presence in the Asia Pacific and Japan region.

"You can do some simple maths and add up how many homes you want to reach with

the NBN and what kind of bandwidth you want into each home... you'll get a number

that is hundreds of terabytes a second," he says.

"Then look at the core capacity of where you're sourcing the videos. If you're going to

source them in the middle of the network you will need hundreds of terabytes a

second, but you only have a few, so you're off by two orders of magnitude."

Globally in the 2015 financial year Akamai recorded revenue of $US2.2 billion, with a

net profit of $US321 million, the Asia Pacific and Japan region is its fastest growing,

and it now has 70 employees in Sydney and Melbourne.

Akamai has been operating in Australia since the early years of the company, but

became a recognised name in 2012 when it was appointed to manage mass online

shopping event Click Frenzy's second major sale, after its first had flopped due to

demand crashing the website.

The company has also recently started to see growth in its cyber security division,

which had been chugging along quietly since 2002.

Security concerns

In the past full year its cyber security products generated $US400 million in revenue,

and it is predicted to be the largest growing segment of the company.


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Dr Leighton says it started to take off in the past few years thanks to a number of high

profile cyber security breaches like Target, Yahoo and last year's Dyn denial-

of-service-attack, but he warned that the threat of attacks was still being

underestimated.

"The mirai botnet can generate one to two terabytes a second of traffic. Which is

probably enough to disconnect Australia from the rest of the world, and that's a tiny

fraction of the capacity of what could be out there using IoT devices," he said.

Dr Leighton's credentials in talking about the evolving issues facing the internet are

impeccable.

While he was a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT) he worked down the hall from the inventor of the World Wide Web,

Tim Berners-Lee.

It was discussions with Mr Berners-Lee about his concerns for future congestion on a

popular internet that led to the creation of Akamai.

"Tim could see the future when he was creating the web and

that having websites served from only a few places was going to create a problem," Dr

Leighton says.

"Even with the poor connectivity we had in the last mile back then, there would still

be times when we would overwhelm the source of the content and it was called a

flash crowd or hot spot problem.

"We had an academic idea of using distributed computing [to solve the problem], but

at the time people thought it was very impractical. Ultimately the only way we were

going to have any impact was to start a company, so that's what we decided to do, but

it was our last option. I was pretty happy being a professor."

Early days

Akamai's early success was based around high-profile client wins as widespread

online viewing was taking off in the US.

The start of the US college basketball tournament in 1999 (known as March Madness)

and the release of a new Star Wars movie trailer, gave it the opportunity to

demonstrate that it could help manage the spike in demand on high-traffic sites.

"Back then everyone would go to ESPN to see how their favourite college was going on

the first day. It was hosted by a company called Infoseek, but they went down from the

load," Dr Leighton said.

"They called us and asked if we could handle 2000 requests per second ... within 15

minutes the website was back up and we were delivering 3000 a second. Everyone

noticed and we were able to sign up other large accounts."

On the same day, Akamai had been approached by TV show Entertainment Tonight to

help it deliver the release of the new Star Wars trailer.


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Unknown to Akamai, Apple had got the rights to show the trailer, so ET was

effectively broadcasting it illegally.

However, demand was such that Apple and all other bootleg copies of the trailer

online crashed under the traffic, and ET's was the only copy still viewable on the

internet. This caught Steve Jobs' attention and Apple tried, unsuccessfully, to buy

Akamai, before becoming its first strategic investor.

Despite being the co-founder, it wasn't until late 2012 that Dr Leighton took on the top

job as chief executive, having previously been content being the chief scientist.

He insisted on having a $US1 salary and only took stock options when he took the job

of chief executive. For about 15 years he went uncompensated, but held onto his

founding shares which are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

"I actually also bought stock in the open market last year... which is a little

non-standard. Usually CEOs sell," he said. "It's an important message to send that the

CEO really does believe in the company."

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Akamai CEO warns NBN won't fix internet speeds, and sees rapid growth in cyber threats | afr.com

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