How Open Caching Solves Content Delivery Bottlenecks
What is the biggest challenge that open caching is currently trying to solve? According to Gautier Demond, Vice President Sales Content Publishers NA, Qwilt, the biggest problem-solving advantage of open caching is removing the traditional bottleneck of CDN networks. In the past, he says, high traffic bottlenecks from events such as live sports and the premier of major shows have not been the result of limited server capacity but instead, it was more of an issue of access to the networks. “How can we put that much traffic into an ISP to reach the number of eyeballs that we need to reach?” Demond says.
“So the way that open caching approaches that issue is by saying, we're going to partner with the ISPs and we're going to deploy architecture inside the network…with a density and a granularity that has never been done before,” Demond says. “If you look at a top US ISP, for example, you're going to have big CDNs [which are going to] have four, five nodes. [With] one of the largest ISPs in the US, we deploy 600 nodes within a single ISP. So those nodes are smaller, but the density and the granularities are much more important.”
Demond highlights another smart aspect to open caching is the way it is reinventing overall relationship with ISPs. “That means that the ISPs are seeing that content delivery as a revenue stream for them. So for the very first time, all [of the] delivery chain, right from the content producers to the CDN, to the ISPs, they all have a vested interest, making sure that the content provider is happy and that the users get the best quality of experience possible.” He emphasizes that this makes true partnerships with ISPs possible because in order for the highest efficiencies, the ISPs provide access to their data.
“They give access to analytics,” Demond says. “Which is very important with those big live events, right? [They’re] basically helping us provide eyes on glass monitoring during a big live event. And that's kind of like…revolution is a big word, but that's kind of like the evolution, the next-generation content delivery platform we're trying to work on. And by deploying that globally and making sure that all those ISPs are interconnected to the open caching format, makes [for] a very good evolution and a very interesting value proposition for content delivery.”
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