Whitepaper released on ‘Making the case for edge data centers’
EdgeConneX, specializing in global data center solutions at the edge of the network, has announced the availability of a new whitepaper, ‘Making the Case for Edge Data Centers’, documenting the benefits of Edge Data Centers (EDCs) as a means to combat the negative effects of exploding internet traffic and congestion.
This whitepaper, prepared by Heavy Reading contributing analyst, Alan Breznick, examines the latest trends in the broadband and video space and their implications for cable operators and other Communications Service Providers (CSPs). Specifically, this paper focuses on the use of localized EDCs to deliver bandwidth-intensive content and latency-sensitive applications closer to end-users, resulting in significant transport cost savings and an improved customer experience.
As the number of people on the internet continues to rise and end users consume an increasing amount of bandwidth-intensive content such as online videos and complex websites, internet traffic is exploding and shows no signs of slowing down. As a result, cable operators, telcos, and other CSPs find themselves in a growing bind as they watch their backbone networks fill beyond the breaking point.
Web traffic continues to surge by as much as 30 to 50% each year, clogging the network with a rising deluge of data, voice and video signals. To combat this growing issue, providers are turning to the EDC model to bring their content, services and apps closer to end-users outside of Tier 1 markets.
EdgeConneX EDCs enable faster and more affordable content delivery by allowing large CSPs, newer edge providers and legacy content providers to offload much of their bandwidth-intensive content, services and applications to the local ISPs in the market. With this approach, providers can cache content in local data centers until it is ready to be viewed, enabling fast, simple and reliable delivery to customers without running into traffic bottlenecks and the Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) problems that they invariably cause.
“At EdgeConneX, our goal is to enhance the end-user experience of consumers that reside outside of Tier 1 markets,” explains Clint Heiden, chief commercial officer, EdgeConneX. “By deploying our Edge Data Centers in Tier 2 and 3 markets at the edge of the network closer to end-users, we are enabling a new distribution model that not only results in high-quality consumption, but makes the delivery of bandwidth-intensive content and services faster, easier and more affordable for all providers.”
Through the localization of traffic management at EDCs, providers can reduce the peak traffic load on their heavily strained networks, cut backbone transport costs, accelerate the delivery of content, services and applications to residential and commercial consumers, and improve end-users’ experience. These benefits ultimately result in increased subscriber engagement, enhanced customer satisfaction and lower subscriber churn rates within an increasingly competitive marketplace.
