CDN Market Gets More Competitive

CDN Market Gets More Competitive, Flirts with Net Neutrality Issues

At IBC in Amsterdam, the week offered ample evidence that competition in the CDN market is about to heat up. Several companies announced products and services positioned to help operators, particularly telcos, enter the content distribution business. Three of the offerings - from Kaltura, Jetstream, and Ericsson - had the same fundamental approach:

• Because operators own local/regional broadband networks, they are in a great position to use it as a content distribution network; and • Operators should thus sell enhanced delivery services to OTT providers, allowing them to deliver a higher quality of service and experience

The companies will either provide the technical solution for operators to run themselves or host the service for the operator.

Many operators are already participating in the CDN business. For example, AT&T launched CDN services back in 2008 and BT recently announced its "Content Connect" service using Cisco technology. With all these CDN solution announcements, it looks like the market space is about to get a lot more competitive.

Some of you may be wondering if operators should have the right to sell enhanced delivery services on their broadband networks. In the U.S., there is a big question as to whether operators can do such a thing without conflicting with the principles of net neutrality. Operators lease their broadband networks to U.S. users in a piecemeal fashion via individual broadband subscriber agreements. Imagine instead that they start selling part of this bandwidth to OTT providers to provide enhanced delivery. That bandwidth would be taken away from broadband subscribers and would, therefore, degrade performance to all except those using the enhanced service. Were this to happen, the broadband pipe would cease to be open, instead controlled by a few wealthy companies able to buy preferred access.

It is interesting to note that the recent Google/Verizon proposal for net neutrality carefully avoids this issue:

"...our proposal would allow broadband providers to offer additional, differentiated online services, in addition to the Internet access and video services (such as Verizon's FIOS TV) offered today ... such online services must be distinguishable from traditional broadband Internet access services and are not designed to circumvent the rules." Related Reading:

ENDS

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