SCIENTISTS TRYING TO SOLVE INTERNET BUFFERING ISSUE

Scientists and information technology researchers from all over the world have been hired to finally put a stop to that most annoying of internet issue-- the endless buffering that happens right in the middle of so many videos viewed across the Web.

To make this happen, the European Commission will spend €3,569,000 until 2016 in an effort to reduce internet latency without a requirement for newer or stronger connections.

Instead, the team will have to come up with a new method to rewrite how computers and servers send data to each other in order to speed up the network of all networks.

Taken from the University of Aberdeen, Simula Research Labs in Norway, the University of Oslo and Karlstad University in Sweden, the team will work with people from British Telecom, Alcatel-Lucent, Bell in Belgium and Institut Mines-Telecom in France.

The scientists will try to determine new mechanisms in the network and the end-hosts to reduce or get rid of the effects of delay on gamers, video-oIP (video over IP) users and internet people that need higher speeds at downloading large files or streaming video.

“It’s a real issue that we all face, especially when using a program like Skype. If anyone else in the house is watching a video at the same time, your video connection suddenly becomes spotty and often simply disconnects," said professor Gorry Fairhurst, and internet engineer at Aberdeen University in the U.K.

“To be sure, this affects gamers who want to play online in real time and individuals that need to download large files of data – both end up buying special and expensive internet connections to make these work, but often it’s not more bandwidth that’s needed to go faster but less delay in getting it in the first place. We think we can reduce this delay by making a set of small but important changes to the way computers, servers and the network process the internet data,” he added.

The team and its backers say that if they manage to come up with a workable solution to get rid of buffering, it will help users all over the globe with slow internet speeds.

"We’re focussed on one defined issue and we think there are solutions for this, but we have to change the current internet standards for the Web," he added.

"This isn’t something that companies like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Apple will undertake lightly, but we expect they’ll take up what we’re doing because this has benefits for everyone in the long term. If we can’t do something that the rest of the world stands up and says – ‘ok I get it, we’ll standardise it’, then we’ve failed," added Fairhurst.