Netflix and Google Make Land Grab On Edge of Internet 85
An anonymous reader writes "In an end-run around slow Internet backbone providers, Netflix and Google (plus a dozen more large content giants) are in a bitter fight to deploy servers and dominate the consumer edge of the Internet. This Wired article provides some of the first graphics of this fight and how it is changing the underlying Internet infrastructure. The source of the article (DeepField blog post) also has some pretty interesting commentary."
basically vertical integration with CDNs (Score:5, Informative)
As the article notes, from an internet-topology standpoint this isn't that new, dating back to Akamai-type CDNs starting in the 1990s. The idea is that you mirror your content inside several of the major edge networks, so e.g. Comcast users get served from the Comcast-local mirror. You then update the mirror whenever there's new content, but every single user doesn't have to re-fetch that video over the public internet to Comcast's network.
The main difference is that some of the large content providers are building out their own private CDNs, so Google is setting up its own edge-network mirrors instead of contracting out to Akamai. That's not a major technical change, but could have some important implications for competition.
Re:basically vertical integration with CDNs (Score:5, Informative)
Re:basically vertical integration with CDNs (Score:4, Informative)
I think that's the biggest reason for this change: They need to stay competitive with companies that don't have to pay for bandwidth. See Netflix is a bandwidth hog. Who will pay? (Hint: You.) [cnn.com]