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Life in the Internet fast lane is no longer the dominion of the privileged few. The lagged service, outages and overall quality issues of yesterday’s ISPs are set to dissipate as we enter a new age of content distribution, management and prioritization.

A recent blog post from cloud content delivery specialists Teridion states the case pretty succinctly. While service providers make many claims and promises about quality of service and connectivity speeds, the reality is that many of them simply don’t own the last mile of content delivery. Whether it’s a consumer, a business LAN or WAN or a more complex multi-tenant distribution environment, service providers usually don’t have much control over the entire end-to-end network experience.

“No one owns the internet,” wrote Bill Zajac, sales engineer at Teridion. “Fundamentally traffic is able to flow over the Internet because of relationships between different ISPs. ISPs will receive traffic from a downstream ISP and push it upstream to another ISP where it has a peering relationship.  No one has ownership of the complete stream and this is where the problems exists.”

With net neutrality and other global regulatory measures in place to level the service provider and carrier playing field, this scenario is unlikely to change anytime soon. That means the best and most efficient way to tackle the transport problem is to look at the larger picture and seek out the fastest route to move data from one point to another.

Teridion’s approach to this conundrum is to offer an intelligent “overlay network” that can proactively make routing and management decisions based on where data is coming from and where it needs to go. If one service provider can’t be responsible for the deliver pipes, someone can take ownership of the delivery path, whatever that path ends up being.

Teridion’s solution accomplishes this using SDN and NFV to find the Internet fast lane, whatever that may be. The company’s Global Cloud Network works at the IP layer, scaling on demand as needed and deploying virtual routers only when necessary to handle traffic loads. The result, according to Teridion, is throughput speeds of 20 times faster than the average.

Service providers, no matter how large and powerful they may be, will never be able to control the entire end-to-end networking experience. By taking advantage of an intelligent overlay network to manage content, providers can give their customers fast speeds and great service without owning the myriad pipes and paths involved in the process.