CDN Strategy Blog

The StreamZilla infrastructure page just got a refresh to reflect the current infrastructure status. The network is now connected to 17 Internet Exchanges throughout Europe and to the New York……NYIIX Internet Exchange.

The European Internet architecture is very different than how it is designed in the USA. Virtually all access providers have local/regional networks. In order to connect to other access providers, telcos and carriers, the access providers connect to European and regional Internet Exchanges. Most IX-es are neutral territory so anyone can interconnect and make transit, open peering or private peering arrangements.

The largest IX-es are AMS-IX (Amsterdam), DEC-IX (Frankfurt) and LINX (London). These exchanges cover the vast majority of the European networks. These three exchanges are the most important ones. That is why most global CDNs have connectivity to (just) these IX-es: just four on average.

For example, take AMS-IX (scroll down): Highwinds connects with 80Gbps, Akamai has 2*40 = 80Gbps, Limelight has 40Gbps, CDNetworks and Edgecast each have 10Gbps.

Virtually every country has it’s own IX as well. The global CDNs don’t connect to these local exchanges. We do: the network has a 2Tbps fiber ring throughout Europe with over 750Gbps actual connectivity to 17 Internet Exchanges in Europe (over 100Gbps at AMS-IX alone), the NYIIX in New York and various carriers including Tata, TeliaSonera, AboveNet and Interoute:

When Akamai started to deploy their CDN over 10 years ago, they had to deploy web caches (not necessarily with streaming support) in all those small telco networks out there. Because the interconnects were horrible back then. Their CDN is extremely distributed.

But with todays Internet Exchanges, interconnects and their capacity, CDNs try to use superpop designs: one or two, maybe three datacenters at most in Amsterdam, London or Frankfurt to push content via the top IX-es to all the European telcos. But there are some downsides: the most important issue is that the CDN completely relies on a chain of third parties for delivery: these CDNs throw traffic over the fence at the IX: what if the IX is having issues? What about the carriers, interconnects, peers and telco networks? You should really question their performance claims.

StreamZilla is also a superpop designed CDN: most servers (which all do all streaming + http) are concentrated in multiple modern (and green) datacenters around the largest IX of the world: AMS-IX, Amsterdam. Because of the deep connectivity of the network itself throughout Europe, we are not limited by the capacity and load of the top few exchanges: within a hop we are in every serious local IX throughout Europe. With higher performance and higher QoS as a result than other CDNs can offer. Because of the local presence, it is an option to setup regionally deployed edge servers for local ‘oomph’. We are not locked to the network either: we can setup an edge anywhere as long as it is connected to the web.

And remember what we are doing with VDO-X: we are deploying CDNs for local hosting, streaming and access providers in various countries. We are helping these operators and telcos to build on-net CDNs in their own country. That further lowers the costs. The telcos actually save costs. And can make money for local delivery. QoS and performance is unbeaten. What is going to happen when we tie all those local CDNs and StreamZilla together?….