In a message written on Fri, Dec 03, 2010 at 11:08:21AM -0500, Christopher Morrow wrote:
the above is essentially what Akamai (and likely other CDN products) built/build... from what I understand (purely from the threads here) Akamai lost out on the traffic-sales for NetFlix to L3's CDN. Comcast (for this example) lost the localized in-network caching when that happened.
Playing devils advocate here.... I think the issue here is that the Akamai model saves the end user providers like Comcast a boatload of money. By putting a cluster in Fargo to serve those local users Comcast doesn't have to build a network to say, Chicago Equinix to get the traffic from peers. However, the convential wisdom is that the Akamai's of the world pay Comcast for this privledge; Comcast charges them for space, power, and port fees in Fargo. The irony here is that Comcast's insistance to charge Akamai customer rates for these ports in Fargo make Akamai's price to Netflix too high, and drove them to Level 3 who wants to drop off the traffic in places like Equinix Chicago. Now they get to build backbone to those locations to support it. In many ways I feel they are reaping what they sowed. I think the OP was actually thinking that /Comcast/ should run the caching boxes in each local market, exporting the 50-100 /32 routes to "content peers" at Equinix's and the like, but NOT the end user blocks. This becomes more symbiotic though as the content providers then need to know how to direct the end users to the Comcast caching boxes, so it's not so simple. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/