Network Communications News (NCN) October 2017 | Page 18

THE KNOWLEDGE NETWORK
The power of the
peer pressure protocol
Jacob Loveless, CEO, Edgemesh argues that we can no longer rely on legacy CDN to deliver
content to the end user, exploring how peer accelerated CDN’s help deliver content like Netflix.
W
ith the global
e-commerce
market
expected
to reach $4
trillion by 2020, we are no longer
able to rely on weak internet
to entice customers and grow
e-businesses. Netflix, a popular
internet-based video service
among millennials, delivers a
myriad of content to millions of
viewers simultaneously around the
globe. Most notably though, users
have almost identical experiences
regardless of geographical location
and broadband capacity. Posing
the real question of how Netflix
is able to achieve such a globally
consistent CDN service.
The answer, Netflix has its
own private proprietary and
somewhat game changing content
distribution. In order to maintain
fast, reliable and low-cost content
distribution Netflix identified that
data needs to be brought to the
user and not the other way around.
18 | October 2017
The problem
The internet works today much as
it has for the past 40 years. Edge,
or last mile, regional networks
consolidate into metropolitan
networks which, depending on
device density, consolidate into
regional networks. From there, the
internet exchange points further
consolidate traffic into major
delivery hubs.
The issue with this being that
these consolidation points can
often lead to major congestion.
Not too dissimilar to a traffic-jam,
whereby if everyone is going north,
no-one can get there quickly. With
internet traffic, we observe this as
increased latency, poor quality and
complete unavailability.
How the Netflix
changed the game
Recognising that congestions would
lead to a poor user experience,
Netflix embarked on a radical new
Content Delivery Network design
in 2011 called Open Connect. The
concept was simple, bring the
content to the edge by placing
copies of the entire Netflix catalogue
inside regional and metropolitan
ISPs. With Open Connect, Netflix
delivers a server to ISPs that
allows Netflix customers to stream
thousands of titles all without ever
leaving their local ISP. When every
second of load time counts, every
kilometer of fibre matters.
Why can’t everyone do this?
The idea of bringing content to the
edge is not a new idea however,
the sheer scale of the Netflix CDN
is something no single company
had ever done. With Open
Connect, Netflix has dramatically
increased per formance while
decreasing backbone costs and
its own bandwidth fees.
With an evident array of
benefits, why doesn’t every CDN
do what Net flix does and place
caches for their customer in