California drivers are a different breed. Especially if they’ve ever lived in Los Angeles. Maneuvering through L.A.’s congested streets is not for the faint of heart. It requires eternal vigilance and a willingness to be aggressive. When that light switches to yellow, you don’t slow down. You go, hopefully making it through before it flashes red.
Yet even the most strident of California motorists knows that white-knuckling it through endless stop and go mayhem will only take you so far. You need a layup from technology if you want to combat bumper-to-bumper traffic and actually get to your destination on time.
Personally, I like Maps for its simple interface. It’s my go-to when nothing’s on the line and I can take my sweet time to get to my destination. But when the chips are down, when I need to say, get from south O.C. to Century City for a 7 AM meeting, I bring in the big guns: Waze.
The navigation app leverages machine learning and crowdsourced intelligence, specifically other drivers’ GPS data, to plot the fastest route in real-time. When a hazard or accident forces cars to slow down, Waze takes note. It then reroutes you through side streets, back alleys, maybe even a mysterious cobblestone bridge through the Shire to reach your destination.
Now, unless you’re some directional wizard, you would’ve never dreamed of trying these detours on your own. That’s the magic of dynamic routing, a boon that’s gotten me out of more traffic pickles than I can count.
But imagine if you had a different, yet related problem. Due to where you live, an underserved/emerging market, your WIFI is slow. We’re talking interminably slow. Web pages take ages to load. Zoom calls keep dropping or freezing. All this endless lagging hurts your business. After all, time is money.
What if you could use a similar solution to solve this second challenge: real-time rerouting. Only this time, instead of moving your car, you’re moving data, millions of packets of it, through a clogged internet highway. This is what a company called ExitLag set out to do.
How? By combining AI technology pioneered through … video gaming.
From Gaming Annoyances to a Global Solution
“Honestly, we didn’t set out to solve the world’s internet inequality problem,” said Lucas Stolze, ExitLag’s CEO when I sat down with him. “Our business model initially began with a simple yet urgent issue: gamers hate lag.”
He’s onto something.
In fast-paced online games, milliseconds matter. A poor connection can cost you the winning shot in a multi-person sports match. These virtual nailbiter games mirror the competitive flavor of the physical variety. Often spread out across the world, players rely on split-second timing to make shots or passes. Even a minor latency spike can result in “input delay,” meaning a command is executed too late, disrupting synchronization between devices, players, and ultimately, outcomes.
“We built a solution to address this common gaming challenge,” said Stolze. “Our platform uses real-time traffic optimization and AI-powered predictive routing to secure the most optimal path through the web—just like Waze finds the quickest route through city traffic.”
Core to ExitLag’s model is one central difference: Rather than relying on default internet routing, which can be chaotic and outdated, ExitLag acts autonomously. Using intelligence at scale, AI charts its own connectivity course, capitalizing on a network of local servers and cloud integrations to move data based on dynamic conditions as they develop. “Though we initially created this to help gamers, it now has much wider societal implications,” said Stolze.
A Smarter Shortcut
To grok the underlying technology, it’s helpful to imagine the internet as a vast freeway system, not unlike the 405. At any given moment, billions of devices are trying to move data across it. This leads to bottlenecks, especially if and when network disruptions and server outages exacerbate flow.
ExitLag employs AI to seek out the best route to counter such obstacles. If one path is blocked, AI doesn’t have to idle like a Prius stuck in the carpool lane at 5 PM. It can resort to multipath routing, algorithms capable of transporting data to several routes at once. Whenever one path isn’t viable, yet another might be, slashing lag time. Again, this is all automatic, the function of computers talking to each other with little to no direct human intervention.
Beyond Gaming
As discussed, a slow internet connection is frustrating for gamers. But connectivity stakes can be more drastic for underserved communities. They might even be life or death. Many suffer from unstable internet connections in developing countries like Vietnam or the Philippines, even in rural parts of America. The usual culprits behind connectivity hindrance tend to be outdated infrastructure and limited fiber cables.
Knowing this, imagine you’re the head of a Sub-Saharan Africa hospital. One day an 8-year-old girl is rushed to your operating room suffering from a ruptured appendix. Without immediate surgery she may go septic and die. Unfortunately, your facility lacks a specialist surgeon at this precise moment.
In the past you’ve relied on remote surgery, connecting you to a world-class pediatric medical center in Philadelphia. In order to successfully accomplish robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery via high-precision instruments controlled over the internet you need an ultra-low-latency connection. This is because every micro-adjustment of a robotic arm must translate in real time.
Without such consistent transmission, your young patient could very well die.
Smart multipath routing systems can save the child by tapping into cloud networks from the likes of Amazon and pairing it with local infrastructure. It all comes together by building a kind of internet scaffolding to patch connectivity gaps. ExitLag isn’t alone in using AI to mitigate connectivity challenges, especially in the remote medical care space. Proximie, a cloud-based software platform, also utilizes AI and video compression to enable real-time telepresence, even in limited bandwidth environments.
Leveling the Playing Field
Access to fast, lag-free connectivity is no longer some nicety. Increasingly, it’s becoming a must-have in our complex society. Being locked out of the internet, even for nanoseconds at a time, can set back people and businesses. By applying machine learning to a real, daily frustration it’s clear to see how AI can boost more than productivity. It can serve as a bridge, offering the underserved unprecedented web access, and in the process, enable greater equality. A true game changer, it speaks to technology’s real promise: imagining a brighter future for everyone to move through.
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