Researchers look to boost internet speeds

No matter how carefully you design your website and optimise it to be as smooth and fast as possible, one thing you can't help with is the quality of the connection at the other end.

While there are many things you can do you make your website faster, such as using dedicated servers with appropriate bandwidth to handle the traffic and tweaking your web servers to make them as efficient as possible, its inescapable that some end-users will be coming in from poor lines.

What this could mean to these individuals is they will have to wait longer for pages to load, while video could be jerky and require extensive buffering.

New research for websites boost

However, this could be set to change in the coming years if new research being conducted in the UK is a success. A team at the University of Aberdeen are embarking on a project they hope will significantly boost internet speeds by rewriting the way in which computers communicate with one another.

Internet engineer at the university professor Gorry Fairhurst explained: "It's a problem we all notice when you're using a program like Skype. If anyone else in the house is watching a video at the same time your video connection becomes jerky and often crashes."

Benefits to gamers

One of the reasons why some people may experience problems when streaming data is because the current internet is set up to increase the volume of traffic it can handle. A consequence of this is that real-time interactions such as video streaming and gaming suffers due to buffers within the network.

Individuals who play online games frequently are among those who are set to benefit from the innovations, which will seek to cut down on the latency issues experienced by people with poor connections.

"Often it's not more bandwidth that's needed to go faster - it's less delay. We think we can reduce this delay by making a set of small but important changes to the way computers and the network process the internet data," Prof Fairhurst said.

If successful, this could be great news for anybody who wants to play online games using dedicated servers or stream large amounts of video.