Bypassing the Middle Mile Bottleneck

This week’s NANOG meeting (the North American Network Operators Group) is shaping up to be one of most interesting to date. Arbor Networks, the University of Michigan, and Merit Network are presenting their findings at NANOG47 from a two-year global study of Internet traffic. The Internet Observatory Report is said to include analysis of changes in: Internet topology, commercial relationships between service providers, and Internet protocols and applications. The groups responsible for the report have already published some initial findings, and one data point in particular stands out. According to the study, there has been a rise in “Hyper Giants” of Internet traffic.

“Five years ago, Internet traffic was proportionally distributed across tens of thousands of enterprise managed web sites and servers around the world. Today, most content has increasingly migrated to a small number of very large hosting, cloud and content providers. Out of the 40,000 routed end sites in the Internet, 30 large companies – ‘hyper giants’ like Limelight, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube – now generate and consume a disproportionate 30% of all Internet traffic.”

The consolidation of traffic supports a premise that Limelight Networks has touted for some time: the importance of the middle mile. While traffic used to flow in a much more distributed fashion from end point to end point, a great number of IP packets today start in large data centers on hosted servers and are routed down the most efficient path before connecting to a last-mile network. This consolidation in the middle mile towards more efficient, network-based carriers leads to greater control and higher performance along the content delivery chain.

If that last point of emphasis sounds familiar, it should. Recently we announced the Limelight Networks next-generation XD Platform. The XD Platform is based on several patent-pending software technologies, but one of its key strengths is the ability to “see” network conditions around the world. Using that data, the platform determines the best route through the middle mile (largely on the private Limelight fiber network) and also to the end-user by adapting settings for the Internet conditions at that moment for high-performance (i.e. fast, sustained) content delivery. In other words, a lot of Internet traffic is conducted by Limelight Networks because of the promise of better, faster delivery. Hyper Giants are the companies like Limelight Networks that have perfected efficient delivery and have therefore started to gather a high percentage of Internet traffic over the last two years. We’re the FedEx and UPS companies of the IP world.

Interested in learning more? Read the complete Internet Observatory Report here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 8:28 am and is filed under Content Delivery Network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.