TECHNOLOGY TRENDS

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Commercial imperatives: why CDNs aren’t the whole solution

Content delivery networks are not the only way operators can achieve traffic optimisation and cost savings in their networks. Operators can also use established transparent cacheing technology, and some are already doing so to save on traffic transit costs and to bypass a direct relationship with content publishers. Transparent cacheing technology identifies and stores content on the operator’s network, typically at the edge, yet to the end user it appears to be coming straight from the content provider. In contrast, a commerical CDN stores content for payment and with the consent of the content provider which has coded that content. The predominant issue, however, is that the bulk of traffic may not be available for storage in

a CDN. “Figures vary, but you could be looking at 90% of traffic today on networks that can’t be cached [in a CDN] for technical or commercial reasons,” says Informa’s Gallagher. The reasons include content not being popular enough to store economically; or, for example, in the case of popular YouTube video content, Google is building its own CDN which will remove that content from operators’ commercial strategies unless they strike agreements. “Operators will have to build a system where they can charge for content but also deal

with content where no financial relationship exists,” says Gallagher. Informa estimates that popular videos that operators can charge for using their CDNs may account for just 40% of traffic in five years’ time. “You are still left with a big 60% of content which could not be [CDN] cached,” says Gallagher. “And so now what you could transparently cache to make savings is anything from 20% to 60%—a lot are saying 30-40%—but it is vastly unknown as no relationship exists between providers of such content and the CDN or network operator.” EdgeCast’s Segil agrees that transparent cacheing is a valuable complement to CDNs,

but he claims the technology is only able to capture 5% of cacheable Internet content. In contrast he says 60% of all traffic is cacheable, and that commercial CDNs can capture all of that. Nevertheless, transparent cacheing is gaining currency with operators, says Gallagher. “With some major operators there are dual RFPs: you’ll have a managed CDN part for charging and a transport cacheing part for content that they cannot charge for.” And at least one operator has issued a large RFP requesting transparent cacheing immediately. “The operator will deal with the more complex issue of whether it can charge for CDN services later,” says Gallagher. EdgeCast believes operators interested in transparent cacheing are using the technology

as a “band aid” to alleviate traffic growth pressures, while they determine their CDN strategy. “The good thing about transparent cacheing is that you don’t need to build out a sales force and a business model for CDNs to go out and sell the services,” says Segil.

activity at branded TV content providers in the UK. “We have signed up customers but we haven’t made any public announce- ments,” says Orme. AT&T’s CDN is used by several media

and enterprise customers, but the opera- tor also highlights increasing demand for delivering more dynamic content such as e-commerce transaction Web sites. “For sites where dynamic content is a signifi- cant component of a Web page, cacheing is not a viable solution,” says Sam Farraj, assistant vice president, AT&T Digital Media Solutions. In such instances improving the connection between the site requesting the content and the origin server is important, and AT&T recently launched its Content Acceleration service to address this. Akamai highlights how it is applying

cacheing and dynamic acceleration for gaming. Cacheing is used to speed up downloads of new games and game- console updates, while acceleration is

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needed for multi-player gaming. Noguer Bau at Juniper argues that in

future users will choose their broadband provider not just on price and speed but also on service experience. “The Internet of the future will not be as we know today,” he says. “There will be plenty of bottle- necks because of the lack of investment, so [service] experience will be a factor.” But if CDN technology is set to play a

central role in operators’ networks, chal- lenges remain. One hurdle for operators is how to compete with established CDN players given the geographically constrained nature of their deployments. “It is a still a challenge to the [operator]

newcomers to present themselves to content providers as something compara- ble to Internet CDN players because of this isolated network geography issue,” says Orme at BT. As a result, much work is going into CDN interoperability in order to establish a global CDN infra- structure. “This is being driven almost

entirely by the operators,” he says. “Like an airline alliance, you can do

the same thing for CDN as long as every- one has the same underlying software,” says Segil at EdgeCast. “We are providing such software and the marketplace that is going to be enabling that.” Level 3’s Gough highlights the chal-

lenge of making CDNs scalable. Broadband subscriber numbers and the access links continue to grow, as does the format of video traffic—from standard definition to high definition and even 3D. “The size of the challenge—the growth in content and the duration it is being watched—has been dramatic,” says Gough. There are also events such as sporting finals that magnify demand for content for short periods: Last year’s World Cup caused a 30-times increase in traffic for certain broadcasters, he says. Despite the challenges, placing content

delivery intelligence alongside fixed and mobile broadband traffic aggregation within operators’ central offices prom- ises new business opportunities, argues Howard at Infonetics. “Once telcos have several major central offices that look like mini data centres, not only will they offer cloud services but they are also going to have servers and storage such that applications run there,” he says. “A critical piece is that in those locations they will now know everything a fixed or mobile user is doing on their broadband connection.” In contrast a Google or an MSN will

only see what a user is doing in their envi- ronment. Howard does not expect telcos to compete with Google by selling adver- tising, but having such user insights could well lure the Internet giants into striking agreements with them. BT’s Orme also identifies this as a

promising development. “One thing content providers are incredibly keen to get their arms around is analytics: what users are doing when and where, in as near real-time as possible,” he says. Such insight could be the silver lining

for operators when it comes to CDNs. “The potential opportunity is there,” says Orme. “But there are so many operational and legislative issues to solve first.” n

www.totaltele.com May 2011