The Return of Web Caching:
Bandwidth Savings, Network Resilience, and On-Demand Content Delivery in a Web 2.0 World
Internet consumption patterns have evolved from "bandwidth-skinny," short-duration activities to bandwidth-hungry, always-on applications such as online digital media, video, voice/videoconferencing over IP, and online games. As media-rich Internet content and applications emerge and evolve, network-based service providers must adapt to keep pace with end users' demands for capacity and quality of service. This will require considerable long-term investment in both physical plant and equipment -- but simply throwing more bandwidth at the problem is not a practical interim solution. Service providers must implement more effective capacity management techniques to handle the ever-increasing volume of Internet traffic delivered over their networks. One such solution is a tried-and-true Web 1.0 technique: Web caching.
The following questions were posed by Blue Coat to Melanie Posey, research director for IDC's Telecom Markets program, on behalf of Blue Coat's customers.
Q. How has the Web changed in the past 10 years, as we've moved from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0/cloud?
A. The Internet has evolved over the years to support increasingly rich modes of communication and social interaction, morphing from a static, unidirectional medium of text and HTML images into a broader platform for entertainment, communications, and "digital lifestyles." In the early days, Web 1.0 activities such as email and Web surfing were bandwidth-light and short-term in nature. Today's Internet supports a vastly expanded array of bandwidthintensive, interactive activities — music and video downloads, Internet radio, social networking, user-generated content, Internet TV, file sharing, multiplayer online games, and cloud-based storage. Content and application providers are eagerly leveraging the Internet as a cost-efficient, ubiquitous platform for business model enablement. As a result, growing supply fuels growing demand.
The combination of enabling technology, Web 2.0 business models, robust network connectivity, and emerging consumer behavior trends (social media adoption, on-demand/time-shifted content consumption, and content/applications portability) results in new capacity demands on networks and new challenges for network-based service providers.
How will they support this explosive growth in consumer Internet traffic, which in the United States alone is set to grow from a daily average of 14,000 terabytes in 2008 to nearly 40,000 terabytes by 2013? Internet video traffic, including downloads and streaming media, is expected to increase rapidly from 20% of total U.S. consumer Internet traffic in 2008 to more than 50% in 2013. Networks must keep pace with end users' expanding demands, requiring different approaches to infrastructure investment and network operations. One such approach harkens back to the early days of the Internet — content localization, also known as Web caching.
Q. How are the dynamics of the "new Web" affecting service providers?
A. The nature and the scope of the next-generation demands placed on service provider networks vary by geographic region, provider type (downstream access, upstream transit/backbone, and mobile), and provider size (global versus local/regional networks). For providers in developing/emerging markets, peering and interconnection is often a challenge, given that major interexchange points are concentrated in developed markets and that international IP transit, where available, is expensive. Tier 1 backbone operators must optimize their large-scale network investments and meet the needs of both downstream consumers interested in content consumption and upstream content/application providers interested in content hosting and distribution.
The dynamics of Web 2.0 call for a new, "on-net" approach to content delivery achievable through implementation of various technologies and architectural topologies that enhance the speed, reliability, and efficiency of network-delivered content as it makes its way from the content owner to the end user. The primary component of optimized content delivery is distributed Web caching and replication capability that stores content closer to the end user by reducing the physical distance between the centralized content/application origin sites and the networks to which the end users' Internet access devices are connected.
What makes Web caching 2.0 different from its dot-com era predecessor is the scope of capability it can provide to network-based service providers at different points in the content delivery supply chain. Next-generation Web caching not only addresses the technology requirements imposed by the sheer volume of Internet traffic (which travels both downstream and upstream), the dynamic nature of Web 2.0 content, and multiple distribution methods (file sharing, progressive download, and streaming). It also offers the potential for business model development through creation of specialized service offerings for subscribers and content/application owners.
Q. What specific challenges do access providers in developing/emerging markets face?
A. Regional differences in Internet structure result in specific challenges for downstream Internet access providers in developing/emerging markets. Key factors include the nature of international and intraregional Internet traffic flows, the rapid pace of broadband service adoption, and physical geography considerations.
Developing/emerging regions will witness dramatic growth in broadband usage. In Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan), broadband subscribers will grow from nearly 130 million in 2009 to more than 190 million in 2013. Similarly, Latin America's base of broadband users will expand from 36 million in 2009 to nearly 60 million in 2013, and broadband subscribers in Central Europe, the Middle East, and Africa will double from 53 million in 2009 to more than 100 million in 2013.
In addition, many of the top Internet destination sites (e.g., Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, iTunes) are hosted in North America, so a considerable amount of Internet traffic originating in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East is bound for the United States. Although groups of carriers are making substantial investments to expand international and intraregional capacity for developing/emerging markets (e.g., submarine cable projects such as Unity and SEACOM), demand growth is outpacing the rate of capacity expansion. Therefore, international bandwidth pricing, which starts at hundreds of dollars per Mbps per month, remains high. Furthermore, geography also complicates connectivity and peering for emerging-market ISPs.
For example, ISPs in Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand and Vietnam incur substantial bandwidth costs to reach regional interconnection/peering points in Singapore or Hong Kong and national interexchange points in country. Expanded international and intraregional submarine cable capacity solves part of the problem for emerging-market ISPs but does little to mitigate upstream bandwidth costs at the last mile. With Web caching technology implemented at Internet peering/interconnection points and in the downstream/access network infrastructure, ISPs can serve more of their end-users' content requests from centralized on-net locations using in-country bandwidth and/or capacity on their own access networks. This yields bandwidth cost savings from reduced use of expensive upstream links to pull popular content from faraway origin sites.
Other advantages of cache-enabled local content delivery include optimized Web traffic management (including enablement of on-net peer-to-peer linkage of distributed local caches), resiliency solutions for peak load/traffic spike situations, enhanced end-user experience (lower latency), and support for service feature developments such as Web filtering–enabled parental and/or cultural content controls and malware protection.
Q. What specific challenges do mobile operators face?
A. The recent rapid growth of mobile Internet usage, fueled by game-changing smartphones such as the iPhone and Android devices, the proliferation of 3G/4G licenses and network deployments, and expanding mobile content/application availability, is a double-edged sword for mobile operators. On the one hand, mobile operators can reap the benefits of new revenue from mobile data plans, increased average revenue per customer, and (in some cases) improved customer stickiness due to device exclusivity now that almost half of the world's current 4 billion-plus mobile connections are data/Internet enabled. On the other hand, mobile operators face operational and business challenges related to giving subscribers what they want (unlimited data usage and persistent, ubiquitous connections to information) while also managing network traffic to ensure quality of service and contain network costs.
The runaway success of smartphones and other wireless connectivity devices such as digital music players, game consoles, tablet computers, ereaders, and the "Internet of things" (e.g., appliances, cars, smart grids) means that mobile operators, like their wired broadband counterparts, not only don't want to negatively impact a key source of revenue growth, but also want to proactively manage the volume of mobile Internet traffic -- thereby mitigating network congestion and containing backhaul expenses.
Business model measures such as bandwidth caps or tiered data pricing plans may solve part of the problem, but longer-term solutions require new approaches to network architecture that more tightly link the wired and wireless components of mobile infrastructure. As mobile Internet usage patterns start to mimic those in the wired broadband realm, service providers face escalating investments in the backhaul segments of their networks, which are the wireline connections that aggregate mobile data requests from the wireless access network to the IP backbone networks where Internet content and applications are hosted. Given that the backhaul network upgrade/expansion process will be expensive and timeconsuming, mobile operators can extend the useful life of existing resources by deploying caching and replication technology in their basestation controller/mobile switching facilities — the mobile/wireless world's equivalent of distributed-edge infrastructure.
Q. How do emerging Web 2.0 Internet usage patterns impact tier 1 backbone providers?
A. The global Internet is an amalgam of separate, but semiautonomous networks bound together by a common IP addressing and routing framework that allows all networks to interconnect with each other directly or indirectly. Tier 1 backbone providers, whose networks form the core of the global Internet, play a key role in delivering content, applications, and data to and from their large customer bases, which encompass downstream access networks (and the Internet traffic generated by ISP and mobile operator subscribers), enterprises, and content providers. Tier 1 backbone providers essentially enable end users on one network to connect with content, applications, and/or end users hosted on or served by another network.
The surge in global Internet traffic creates even greater challenges for the backbone providers that are ultimately responsible for connecting the various demand- and supply-side components of the Internet value chain. Like access and mobile operators, Tier 1 backbone providers must keep pace with capacity demands. In response, many backbone providers are upgrading their network cores to 40Gbps; some are also planning eventual upgrades to 100Gbps. These network upgrades are being implemented gradually as part of long-term scalability and futureproofing strategies. As such, they may not be available to immediately address capacity issues generated by the emergence of the next big iPhone-type "game changer."
Caching technology provides a foundation for rearchitecting the framework of Internet traffic flows both at international peering/interconnect points and across domestic backbone networks, and it offers a rapidly deployable solution for capacity management in the core. With caching technology, backbone providers can introduce "insulation" or "shock absorption" throughout the network to alleviate overall congestion and/or reduce traffic volumes in targeted portions of the network, thereby mitigating the need for immediate network upgrades.
Because caching takes place dynamically in response to real-time Internet traffic patterns, the on-net content delivery serves network provider and end-user needs by improving the availability of whatever content is popular at any given time. This demand-oriented, request-driven approach to content delivery puts the focus squarely on the end users' quality of experience and aligns those requirements with service provider network operations.
Learn more about Blue Coat's web caching solution, CacheFlow.
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Melanie Posey is research director of IDC's Telecom Markets program. In this position, Ms. Posey provides analysis, forecasting, and consulting on telecom and Web hosting sector dynamics, service provider positioning, technological and business model innovation, and industry evolution. For more information on IDC, visit www.idc.com.
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