Cisco and Qwilt – with funding from Digital Alpha – are launching a new as-a-service CDN offering based on open caching with BT as one of its first customers.
Open caching, an open architecture developed by the Streaming Video Alliance, turns service provider edge infrastructure into a content delivery network with open APIs for content publishers. This partnership combines Qwilt’s content delivery platform based on open caching with Cisco’s edge compute and networking infrastructure.
The companies expect that BT will be able to add multiple terabits per second of capacity and provide more cost-effective streaming video to meet growing demand. Cisco’s latest Virtual Networking Index expects consumer internet video traffic will comprise 82% of all (consumer) internet traffic by 2022.
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“At BT we connect for good and streaming video has never been more important than in today’s challenging times,” said Neil McRae, chief architect and managing director for architecture and technology strategy at BT, in a statement. “Our mission at BT is to ensure our customers have the best experience every time and with record levels of streaming we needed to disrupt the status quo. 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.”
“Streaming video may be the killer app for the internet, but it doesn’t have to KILL the internet,” said Jonathan Davidson, senior vice president and general manager of the Mass Scale Infrastructure Group at Cisco, in a statement. “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. Marking this milestone together with Qwilt and Digital Alpha to enable edge cloud services for service providers, we can change the economics of the internet for the future, partnering with customers like BT to help them manage video traffic more effectively.”
Last year, Qwilt introduced Content Delivery Sharing, which it said allows local service providers to be paid to use their own assets to deliver a service that is coordinated by a central entity, and that users get the benefit of on-demand, local service. OTT content providers’ content is delivered by local ISP edge computing assets instead of a CDN.