December CDN News Overview
CDN news has slowed in the past month as the year winds down and deals slow in the run up to the festive break. However, that does not mean there have been no developments in this fast moving industry. As companies look to 2019, there has still been some noteworthy CDN news to look over before the new year.
Akamai Breaks New Data Delivery Records
The first interesting piece of CDN news for December 2018 involves Akamai, one of the world’s largest content delivery network providers.
With a huge number of big name clients including Audi, Best Buy, Fiat, MSN, NBC, Viacom, Thomson Reuters and Philips, Akamai delivers some of the highest volumes of web traffic when compared to its rivals. As such, it isn’t unusual for the Akamai content delivery network to experience high levels of traffic.
However, the content delivery network providers has now set a new record for peak traffic on its global content delivery network (CDN). On Tuesday, December 11, the volume of data being delivered across the Akamai network exceeded 72 Tbps, over taking the 70 Tbps threshold for the first time in the CDN provider’s 20 year history.
“In a year during which Akamai has set numerous records, it’s fitting that we end 2018 on high note,” said Akamai CEO and Co-founder Dr. Tom Leighton.
“The scale, reach and intelligence of our network is the reason Akamai was able to help our media customers deliver this summer’s FIFA 2018 World Cup Russia – the largest sporting event we’ve supported. It’s why more than 10 million people were able to simultaneously stream the Indian Premier League championship cricket match, and it’s how earlier this year Akamai successfully absorbed the single-biggest recorded DDoS attack in history. It’s through the power of the Akamai platform that we’re able to consistently deliver events of unprecedented scale while continuing to provide thousands of customers with the unparalleled performance that they’ve come to expect.”
This record volume of traffic is huge and almost incomprehensible. It is broadly comparable to delivering more than 10 million DVDs per hour. The reason for this increase in traffic is multi faceted. It was driven primarily by live sports events, gaming releases and major software updates along with elevated traffic levels from many of the world’s largest e-commerce sites.
During the same day, Akamai also processed hundreds of billions of API requests, hundreds of millions of dollars in e-commerce transactions, and trillions of internet interactions overall.
The record comes on the heels of a significant year on year surge in holiday shopping traffic this festive season. Akamai delivered an average of 83% more online retail traffic for the combination of Singles’ Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year than during the same major shopping days in 2017.
Akamai has seen big traffic spikes this year driven by popular video games like “Fortnite” and huge events like the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
In July, the company said that within 10 days of the soccer tournament, total traffic surpassed all 64 matches of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. The July 3 Colombia-England second-round match delivered video traffic peaks reaching 18.59 terabits per second.
“This is the highest video traffic peak for any single sporting competition that Akamai has helped deliver. During the 2014 tournament, our highest peak was 6.9 terabits per second during the Netherlands-Argentina semi-final, which set record at the time for the highest peak traffic rate of any live sports event that Akamai had delivered,” Akamai said in a statement.
Sporter.com Leverages the ScientiaMobile Image Content Delivery Network
In other CDN news for December, we have seen a leading sports nutrition eCommerce website leverage a content delivery network provider in order to boost their online bandwidth and ultimately increase sales.
Content delivery networks are an ideal method for companies looking to boost their online bandwidth. Once signed up with a content delivery network provider, identical redundant copies of the company’s website’s data is placed at many different points of presence around the globe. The number of points of presence depends upon the reach of the content delivery network provider that has been selected and the number of regions the client wishes to serve.
By storing data in this way, end users are automatically directed to the point of presence that is geographically closest to them when they request data files. By reducing the distance between end users and the data in this way, latency is reduced and bandwidth increased, resulting in faster download speeds and increased end user satisfaction.
It is for this reason that Sporter.com has selected the ScientiaMobile Image content delivery network to power their eCommerce website.
“In the Middle East, if you are sending a large image to a mobile phone and scaling it on the client side, and the user is on a slow mobile connection, then the slow performance will make people bounce. Most of our customers are using mobile in a region with few POPs, so reducing image size without reducing quality is critical. ImageEngine helped us with that,” said Azzam Jarad, Chief Technology Officer at Sporter.com.
After implementing the CDN, Sporter.com saw many benefits, including increased revenue by 34 percent, decreased CDN costs by 69 percent and streamlined Image Management, saving 90 percent.
British Broadcasting Corporation to Seek DDoS Protection Services
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks can be disastrous for any organisation with an online presence, so it is no surprise that this forms the basis for another CDN news story this month.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is the UK’s largest broadcaster and has a substantial online presence that includes news, current affairs and video streaming through their digital iPlayer service. They have in the past experienced DDoS attacks, and as such, they are seeking a high performance DDoS security solution.
“The BBC’s internet network carries all of the BBC’s audience facing traffic and CDN [content delivery network] origin traffic”, the BBC said.
“Additionally it provides transit for the corporate network. The availability of this network and services delivered across it are crucial in maintaining the BBC’s online presence for critical services such as www.bbc.co.uk & the BBC iPlayer”, a procurement notice emphasised.
The notice goes on to state that “The BBC requires that its internet network will be protected from the highest sustained volumetric based attacks seen on the internet, while having negligible impact on the audience’s experience of BBC online services. This will enable the BBC to protect availability of key services when experience these type of attacks.”
“The successful Supplier’s solution will allow for expected network growth, maintenance and incidents to be handled with minimal impact to service. Additional capacity, new data centres and logical networks can be added (and removed) to the BBC’s internet network without introducing risk to the Cloud based DDoS Monitoring and Mitigation service, providing maximum flexibility and capacity that can be readily increased to easily meet the forecast demands of ambitious business growth”.
This is a smart move by the BBC, as they have increasingly become the target for online attacks. A robust DDoS solution will help ensure they keep the high level of content and online standards expected of them as the UK’s national broadcaster while also ensuring UK viewers have access to new and video at all times.
Comcast to Partner with VivaLive TV
The final piece of CDN news for December we’ll be looking at involves the content delivery network provider Comcast. It has been announced by VivaLive TV, a global entertainment and technology company connecting content owners and video distributors to deliver premium content on any smart device with a screen, that they will be partnering with Comcast in an as yet undisclosed capacity.
VivaLive TV announced that they will soon “begin working on content, logistical and other technological services provided solely by Comcast. We at Viva are extremely excited and honored with this affiliation. Comcast’s open mind has added an element of excitement to the Viva family. This partnership will help enhance our subscriber base in order to create more revenue.”
Given Comcast’s experience in video delivery, it is likely that VivaLive TV will be leveraging their global, high performance content delivery network. We’ll be sure to keep an eye on this CDN new story as it develops.
CDN News for December Round Up
As you can see from the CDN news we’ve gone over, and compared to other months, it has been a relatively quiet month in the content delivery network industry. However the perennial subjects of video delivery and online security have once again popped up, proving that these are two battlegrounds that continue to shape the highly competitive content delivery industry.