Content Delivery Network Strategies, by Stef van der Ziel

Peer2Peer (P2P) is sometimes proposed as an alternative for distributed content delivery. Some CDN’s are built upon P2P technology. P2P vendors, researchers and CDN’s claim that P2P lowers costs. It does. For the content owner. But it raises costs for the network owners. Significantly.

Basically the concept of P2P is that every client can redistribute content to other clients. As a content provider you don’t need to buy servers or traffic. Your audience distributes your content ‘for free’. Ingest the content into the network and let it flow. It is also hard to trace where content is hosted and ingested from. That is why P2P is so popular for (illegal) file sharing services.

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2004. Ah, Fiber to the Home. The holy grail. According to many. Experts warned the government that if we did not invest in the Last Mile today, the Netherlands would become a third world country and internet services would never take off. So they asked the government to invest millions of tax payers money in new Last Miles.

I was a bit sceptical about their claims. Because I coincidentally had done some research about the bottlenecks of the Dutch Internet. And my conclusion was that the Last Mile could perfectly handle future growth, but that the true bottlenecks were at the ISP core backbones, the Internet Exchange and their interconnects (public and private peers).

The experts claimed that broadband services would require more than 20Mbps capacity per household. Maybe even 100Mbps in the future. But there was no research done to prove this claim.

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