White Paper Finds $5.5 B Savings from Local Content Proximity
EdgeConneX®, specializing in hosting solutions at the edge of the network, recently published its latest white paper researched by analyst firm ACG Research, titled "The Growing Value of Content at the Edge," available online as a complimentary download. The white paper focuses on exploding traffic growth and its increasing impact on the backbone transport costs of content providers and eyeball networks. It also examines the value of Edge Data Centers® over regional facilities, which yield lower costs for providers as well as improved customer experience for end-users.
Several compelling findings emerged from the paper's research concerning what constitutes the 'Edge' and an 'Edge Data Center'. New or existing data centers that exist in underserved markets are not necessarily providing an 'Edge' or a new edge of the Internet. Creating a new edge of the Internet requires the localization of content in proximity to the consumers of that content in which one of several measurable attributes are realized. These attributes include the reduction of cost for both the broadband provider and the content provider, improved performance related to throughput and download speeds, and an improved user experience. These attributes signify that the Internet is no longer solely served from one of the eight traditional peering locations across the US, but instead is served locally to subscribers within the underserved market. Traditional data centers in underserved markets do not possess these attributes and therefore are not Edge Data Centers®, which are an innovation of EdgeConneX.
Another key ACG finding revealed that localizing traffic to serve a subscriber base of 1 million households produced backbone transport reductions of $110 million over five years. Applied nationwide to a subscriber base of 50 million households, this represents a $5.5 billion reduction in costs.
ACG applied its expertise in projecting Internet usage by analyzing the key drivers of Internet traffic. This included mobile devices, online multimedia, Cloud services, gaming, the Internet of Things and 4K TV. In Tier 2 markets, where the regional peering points are far from the metro area, these bandwidth-intensive applications created tremendous backbone transport costs for cable MSOs, mobile operators and other ISPs. Moreover, traditional data centers cannot support the high-quality, data-rich user experience that customers demand today.
These data centers introduce network latency, which negatively impacts quality of experience, degrading service value and raising customer churn.
"The growth of content consumption directly drives backbone transport utilization for Internet service providers and content providers," states Michael Kennedy, Principal Analyst, at ACG Research. "Our analysis showed an increase in total costs to the "eyeball networks" even as the cost per gigabit declined. The unique localization solution offered by EdgeConneX provides a path to dramatically reduce this cost."
This ACG white paper also describes several other benefits of local content proximity. This included increased security related to a reduction in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and improved performance for cloud and IoT services.
EdgeConneX specializes in providing purpose-built, power dense and edge of network Edge Data Centers and wireless solutions that enable the fastest delivery of content to end-users. EdgeConneX has created a new edge of the Internet by designing and deploying facilities that are strategically positioned in nearest proximity to network provider aggregation points, ensuring the lowest latency data delivery, with an improved quality of service.
To read the entire white paper, visit the EdgeConneX website.
www.edgeconnex.com
