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Archive for the ‘The Last Mile’ Category:

CDNs and Net Neutrality

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Sep 21 2009

By patching their networks together, many small and large network operators around the world have built a global virtual network: the Internet. It offers open and global access to any server and service in any connected network. The open and neutral character is what made the Internet the next big thing in humanity. So it is important to keep it open and neutral. And it is important to keep it running.

Iin the past few years, there has been discussion about Net Neutrality. Are ISPs allowed to block services? No? What about spam? Are ISPs allowed to shape traffic? No? Not even if a small number of subscribers can take their entire network down? Are ISP’s allowed to rent network resources to service providers so they can accelerate specific services?

In the USA, the Net Neutrality discussion is very polarized: either you are ‘freedom fighter’ who want laws to make sure that no single bit is discriminated or accelerated, or you are against government involvement and want the TelCos to be able to tune their network.

In Europe, we have a different view… Read more »

Business, Distribution, ISP's, Marketing, The Last Mile

There is no European market

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Aug 04 2009
U.S. based CDNs often ten to think that they can enter the European market by having an office in London, Paris or Amsterdam.
Although there is a European Union, without borders, with free economics and a single currency, there is no single market like there is in the U.S.A.
There are over 25 countries and languages in Europe. You will encounter cultural and language barriers. Opening an office in London also means a geographical barrier.
In southern countries, business is done mostly via personal relations. You need to personally meet, drink, eat and laugh. And again and again. And then they may want to deal with you. Business in Eastern Europe is hard. They don’t trust you. And you should not trust them. Let them pay in advance. In other countries, business is very strict. Polish your shoes if you want to do business in Germany. Don’t small-talk too long.
English people can be very rude. They don’t say their name when they call you. “I need a quote, now!”. The French, oh the French are so chauvinistic. They even have their own words for internet protocols. They don’t do business outside France. They still think that France is the center of the world. Like many people from the U.S.A. still think they are the center of the world.
It is changing though. A younger generation grows up with the Internet. And English is the Internet language. It surprises me how well many international customers speak English, especially Italians and Spanish customers.
We have the luck of being in the Netherlands. Dutch people speak two, three, sometimes four or even five languages. We are a very open society and we have always been internationally oriented, both culturally and trade-wise. We are not that chauvinistic and are open to do business with anyone. As long as you pay.
The European market is also dividid for content, both culturally and by language. Shows who are extremely popular in Germany will never work in the UK, even if they were produced locally with local stars in their native language. The Germans don’t get English jokes and the English don’t get German jokes. Really.
Even if you find a content format that works in multiple countries, you have the language barrier. You have to produce content in multiple languages. Some countries require native spoken content. Other countries want dubbed content. And other countries prefer subtitled content. If you do this wrong, no one will watch your content.
Even pan-European broadcasters like MTV and Discovery have custom channels per country or per language region. 95% of all broadcasters are focussed on just one country or one language region.
There is no pan-European advertisement industry. Take the product overview of giants such as Unilever or Proctor & Gamble, and you wil see that the very same toothpaste product has many different names throughout Europe. Heck, we had Dove soap and Dove chocolat.
So there is no European market. If traffic stays for 90% within your own country, why sign up with a global CDN? Why not work together with a regional player?
In Europe there are a lot of regional streaming providers who do local business only. Over 90% of their business is in their own country. Over 90% of their traffic stays within their own country, even though they claim to be a significant European player.
The problem is that these small players can’t innovate fast enough. They can’t compete on support, technology, infrastructure or price.
As far as I know, our own StreamZilla service is the only CDN that has managed to capture a true European market. Over two thirds of our customers (and our traffic) comes from EU countries. We even managed to become dominant in some markets. Only twenty per cent comes from our home country the Netherlands. And about ten percent is delivered to the U.S.A, South America and the rest of the world. Where we have excellent performance too, by the way: A+ status for each streaming protocol.
StreamZilla has grown large enough to compete with larger, USA based CDN’s. We do offer better customer support. Our performance in Europe is better than most global CDN’s can offer. We have been able to invest in technology. And our rates are competitive.
This is also an opportunity for ISP’s. There is no EU market. Imagine you are a content owner. Why sign up with a global CDN if you can do direct business with an operator who controls both access and distribution in the target market?
Build a CDN and do business in your own country, in your own language, in your own cultural way.
So is this a threat to StreamZilla? Yes and no. We may lose some content owners when they can do direct business with ISP’s. But the content owners still need someone to tie the CDN’s together: to act as an overflow platform, to act as an overlay platform.
So is this a threat to local streaming operators? Yes and no. They will lose the innovation race. StreamZilla already proposed some that they stop doing their CDN part and focus instead on value added services: encoding, asset management, translation services, portal services, custom video players. In some markets this turned into a very successful partnership.
So is this a threat to the global CDN’s? Yes. Sorry!

U.S. based CDN’s often tend to think that they can enter the European market by having an office in London, Paris or Amsterdam.

Although there is a European Union, without borders, with free economics and a single currency, there is no single market like there is in the U.S.A.

There are over 25 countries and even more languages in Europe. You will encounter cultural and language barriers. Opening an office in London also means a geographical barrier.

Read more »

Business, Distribution, ISP's, The Last Mile, Value chain

Why are telecom operators deploying CDNs?

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Aug 04 2009

Telecom operators have a four-way strategy to own an on-net CDN. On-net CDNs offer deeper network penetration with better QoS and larger capacity. The CDNs that we deploy support all popular delivery technologies for the web, mobile and IPTV. This means that the telecom operators can:

  1. optimize on-net traffic flow, reduce backbone and peering load
  2. host and deliver on-net web, mobile and IPTV services
  3. sell CDN resources to content owners
  4. Take back the distribution role in the value chain

External CDNs could only have addressed number 3 in this list. Read more »

Business, Distribution, ISP's, Logistics, Technology, The Last Mile, Value chain, Video Working Group

Peer2Peer s*cks, here’s why

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Jul 31 2009

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.

Read more »

Distribution, Fiber to the Home, ISP's, Logistics, The Last Mile, Value chain

Digital Logistics

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Jul 30 2009

2002. Since I already had a background in distributed delivery, I dived deeper into the internet infrastructure, to come up with a smart distributed solution for mass-scale content delivery.

It involved a simple number of technologies I already had developed in operational or rudimentary form. Parallelized delivery servers as core and edge servers. A smart asset and live relay replication mechanism. A smart geo load balancing application. Some log processing scripts.

Technical stuff. But why and how does this work? Let’s compare this with Logistics. Read more »

Distribution, Fiber to the Home, ISP's, Logistics, The Last Mile, Value chain, Video Working Group

Video Working Group

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Jul 30 2009

2002. I had done a lot of research on broadband capacity, edge distribution and CDN management. I foresaw that the Internet would break under the increasing load of online video. I had experienced (eh caused) it myself one time.

The ISP’s would struggle to keep their business case positive. Content owners would be forced to outsource delivery to CDN’s. Who would only be able to distribute to ISP’s.

Read more »

Distribution, History, ISP's, The Last Mile, Value chain, Video Working Group

The iTuner

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Jul 30 2009

2005. Inspired by RSS and Podcasting, I began experimenting with video subscription services. Live and VOD streams via RSS. I called this VODcasting.

I was -and still am- convinced that internet video volumes are still small. The big bang is when consumers will consume high quality video streams in their homes. Sitting on their couch, eating chips, drinking cola and staring at their 52″ plasma’s or whatever, for hours.

There had been some initiatives towards internet stream based Set Top Boxes. Most really were crap. Utter total crap. If it wasn’t the hardware, it was the software. Even the Philips Streamium box sucked.

And if the boxes were OK, then they lacked a good interface, or they could only be used in a proprietary setting, with locked protocols, custom codecs and difficult middleware, exclusive content.

Read more »

Anecdotes, Set Top Box, The Last Mile, Value chain

The Connected Home

0 Comments | This entry was posted on Jul 30 2009

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.

Read more »

Distribution, Fiber to the Home, ISP's, The Last Mile
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