Cisco, Qwilt and Digital Alpha (DA) announced recently how together they are disrupting the commercial Content Delivery Network (CDN) market with a new as-a-service offering based on Open Caching, with BT as the flagship customer.
Open Caching, an open architecture developed and endorsed by the Streaming Video Alliance, offers a platform that federates content delivery infrastructure deployed deep inside service provider networks, into a global CDN with open APIs for content publishers. It is designed to help service providers easily deploy an edge CDN footprint, offering them more control over content flows. It also caters to the needs of global and regional content providers for more capacity, consistency in content delivery and performance assurance.
Featuring Digital Alpha as the investing partner providing a unique funding solution, this partnership combines Qwilt’s innovative content delivery platform based on Open Caching, with Cisco’s edge compute and networking infrastructure to deliver the solution as-a-service to service providers of all sizes around the world.
BT, the UK’s leading telecommunications and network provider, in partnership with Qwilt, Cisco and DA has deployed this solution to add multiple terabits per second of capacity and provide cost-effective, high-quality streaming video to meet its growing demand in 2020 and beyond. Its decision to make the transition to Open Caching is based on the following requirements:
- Deliver the highest-quality streaming experience across its entire network
- Support an open architecture endorsed by the Streaming Video Alliance
- Drive new revenue by becoming an active part of the content delivery value chain
- Reduce content delivery costs by deploying CDN capabilities inside its network
- Eliminate deployment costs using the innovative capex-free model
- Industry and streaming ecosystem support for Open Caching is growing, with over 50 global service providers, technology vendors and content publishers actively involved in moving the content delivery industry in this direction.
Neil McRae, Chief Architect, MD for Architecture and Technology Strategy at BT
Qwilt’s pioneering open caching platform together with Cisco’s cloud infrastructure gives BT the first 5G MEC capability in the UK to deliver premium quality video and on demand services.
Jonathan Davidson, SVP and GM, Mass Scale Infrastructure Group, Cisco
With streaming video expected to represent north of 80% of traffic flowing through service provider networks in the coming years, content delivery is the first of potentially many services they can deploy from within to monetize their edge footprint in the 5G era.
