The internet is slowing down, but Irish company Intune Networks has the solution to a global problem.
It's not quite the Victor Kiam story where the Remington shaver owner quipped: “I liked it so much I bought the company”, but Tim Fritzley’s story echoes this sentiment. Several years ago, the CEO of Intune Networks – an Irish company that could very soon be the driving force for the future of the internet globally – was the head of Microsoft’s TV division, with networks, internet entrepreneurs and Tier-1 telecom operators vying for his time.
Fritzley was cornered at a trade event by a group of earnest young Irish entrepreneurs who told him they could stop the internet from slowing down. Resignedly, he gave them two minutes.
“I asked them for some Tabasco sauce, I was ready to eat crow.” Within three years, Fritzley abandoned his high-flying career with the world’s biggest software company to join this little-known Irish start-up and relocated to Dublin.
Dublin-based Intune Networks, formed in 1999 by a group of ex-UCD photonics researchers, has developed a technology that can enable a single strand of fibre to move from carrying one signal from one operator to carrying data from 80 telecoms and TV companies all at once. It plans to manufacture and export this product and answers a problem that technology giants AT&T, IBM, Cisco and Bell Labs have been trying to solve for 30 years or more.
The fact is the internet is slowing down. While we all talk about getting faster bandwidth speeds, network operators are struggling to keep up. Every minute, 20 hours of new video are uploaded on YouTube, millions of people converse by sound and video via Skype and more than 300 million people worldwide share text, pictures, video and more on Facebook. All of this will contribute to a bandwidth bottleneck that will see network routers possibly burn out.
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