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September 02, 2014

Ushering in a New Age of Content Delivery Networks

By TMCnet Special Guest
Laurie Samper, Technical Writer

Content Explosion

As the Internet grows and evolves, more and more data is being delivered to more places around the world, posing the potential threat of slower speeds due to increased use of bandwidth and longer travel distances.  According to Cisco’s (News - Alert) Visual Networking Index (VNI) 2012-2017, annual global IP traffic will surpass the zettabyte threshold in 2016, increasing more than five-fold in the past five years.  As demand for digital content continues to increase worldwide, providers search for more reliable and cost-effective tools to deliver and manage their video streams, games and websites as well as share content with end-users around the world.



Content Delivery Networks: Today and Tomorrow

Stemming from this genuine necessity for high-speed content delivery are Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), networks of servers spread out across a region (be it international or domestic) to bring content closer to end-users for a faster, enhanced online experience.  CDN software calculates which server is located closest to the end-user, duplicating content on this server to eliminate travel over great distances and reducing the number of hops a data packet must take.  What this does for the audience is generate less packet loss, speedy performance and enhance bandwidth.  As a simple and cost-effective mode of attaining faster content delivery speeds, many companies are turning to CDNs to provide a more satisfying Internet experience for end-users.  Since their inception, CDNs have been evolved to also address the likes of innovations such as cloud adoption, peer-to-peer file sharing, interoperability between devices and energy optimization.  Today’s CDNs encompass all of the above, but their main focus is on delivering automation, more control and the highest quality experience for the end-user.  

In order to achieve their goal of a high quality end-user experience, content providers consider CDNs a critical component of their overall infrastructure.  According to an Informa Telecoms & Media (News - Alert) white paper, the North American commercial CDN services market is projected to be worth $4.63 billion by 2017 – a three-fold increase from 2012.  Cisco tells us that CDNs will carry over half of Internet traffic by 2018.  Not only has the explosion of web-based content delivered via CDNs grown substantially in a short period of time, but it has also changed entirely. 

Today’s users demand even more bandwidth-hungry applications, and video is streamed over the Internet now more than ever.  CBS projects the video portion of the CDN market alone to reach one billion dollars by the end of 2015.  Globally, IP video traffic will be 79 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2018, up from 66 percent in 2013. This increasing demand for web-based content including video streaming and cloud services is expected to advance the global CDN market to $12.16 billion by the end of 2019 according to MarketsandMarkets.  Furthermore, with 6.65 billion mobile subscriptions around the world according to Portio Research, traffic from wireless and mobile devices will exceed traffic from wired devices by 2018.  This data requires even faster speeds and greater stability than traditional desktop users with Internet connections.

Selecting the Right CDN

When beginning the process of selecting the right CDN provider for your company, there are several factors to take into consideration.  Among the most important are a solid infrastructure, advanced backend technologies, the capability to scale quickly and cost-effectively, access to comprehensive services, and seamless integration.  A fully redundant, global network is also highly critical to produce the capability to handle massive traffic spikes while maintaining low latency and high performance.  For added ease and simplicity, the provider should also maintain a highly technical staff available 24x7 to provide support and troubleshooting. 

Your end-users don’t like to be kept waiting and in today’s competitive market, uptime can be the make or break factor for your business.  For example, Aberdeen (News - Alert) Group says that a one-second delay in webpage load time results in a 7 percent loss in conversions, 11 percent fewer page views and a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction.  A reliable CDN is key in this instance, as cisco predicts busy-hour Internet traffic to reach 1.0Pbps by 2018 – that’s the equivalent of 335 million people streaming a HD video continuously. Access to a comprehensive ecosystem of computing services is also important; in today’s fast-paced world, no customer wants to be bogged down with managing multiple service providers, bills and support teams.

Cloud Hosting and Managed solutions provider, Webair, is one example of a provider whose CDN encompasses the factors outlined above.  Webair (News - Alert) recently announced the enhancement of its Content Delivery Network (CDN), expanding its infrastructure, upgrading backend technologies and generating faster integration capabilities for customers.  CDN enhancements such as these can produce substantial advancements in providers’ abilities to deliver content, accelerate applications, enhance flexibility and offer the highest quality end-user experience.

Webair’s enhanced CDN also gives customers more control over their network. Through the utilization of a control panel, EZPanel  Webair customers are now able to add, administer and analyze the overall performance of their CDN.  The company has also developed the ability to reduce CDN integration time to minutes; the solution is fully managed and can be directly integrated into customers’ Cloud Services and Load Balanced Clusters without hardware upgrades or configuration modification.




Edited by Stefania Viscusi
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