Internet Going In-Network To Deliver Olympics Video

While somewhat technical, this post is an important one for anyone to read that's interested in the future of the Internet.

It highlights how NBC is leveraging Limelight Networks CDN services to deliver live and on-demand video from the Olympics. In particular it points out that the reason the Internet didn't crash when everyone went online to watch this video was because of how Limelight delivers video.

Any time you go to a website or watch an on-demand video, those assets you're viewing reside on a server somewhere out on the Internet.

CDNs, or content delivery networks, enable you to deliver Internet content without having to manage your own servers, instead using the CDNs facilities to reach your audience.

Also important to note is that the further away you are physically from the server that has the content you're trying to access, the more likely it is that there'll be an issue or delay in delivering that content, especially streaming video.

What Limelight's done is establish partnerships with over 800 ISPs so that when you're trying to access content over the Internet, in actuality that webpage or video is residing much closer to you, potentially even within your last mile access network.

So there's a chance that when you go to a website you're not technically on the Internet because your traffic never leaves your last mile access network (aka your broadband provider).

In this way content delivery is able to get a higher level of quality of service than is otherwise possible through the larger interconnected cloud that is the Internet, which often requires multiple hops to traverse the distance between server and user.

Ultimately moving more and more content into the last mile access network will be the only way that fiber communities will be able to take advantage of all that bandwidth they have available to them as while the rest of the Internet isn't always prepared to deliver very high quality video, if that video resides within the last mile full-fiber access network, then the sky's the limit in terms of what's possible.

So it's my opinion that if you want to see where the future of the Internet is going to come from, your best bet will be to look in-network, especially in communities like Lafayette, LA where once live their network will offer users 100Mbps of capacity in-network, creating the ultimate laboratory for developing and testing next-gen big-bandwidth applications.