Video is driving local caching and hosting
Ever since video has emerged as the “killer” application on the internet, there has been a gradual move back to caching content in Australia.
“The nature of video is that it is not by nature dynamic, it is static. So when someone posts a video, that video doesn’t change. So there is no reason why you would haul that video a million times over the pipe in a very short time frame,” says IDC's Cannon. “This is the type of business model that Akamai and those guys are based on; it’s called a content delivery network. It is really there to manage video, because it is the culprit.
“It can’t be a centrally distributed architecture. You need to have that content pushed out to the edges [places like Australia] and then have people access it from as close as possible. A couple of months ago Telstra announced it was going to build a content delivery network based on Cisco kit, which was helping them deliver the T-Box product. Yes, right now today 70 per cent or more of content comes from international pipes because there is no caching locally. But that is changing to deal with video and if you look at what driving the potential hockey stick in terms of data growth it is all about video.”
Brooks agreed with Cannon that with some applications and content requiring the minimal amount of latency – which can become an issue on international links - there will be an increase in the amount of local caching.
“A lot of the content distribution networks are establishing Australian nodes here,” he said. “The content in many cases does come from an Australian server even if it appears to be coming from overseas. There is a lot more of that happening.
“From a content provider point of view, if you were putting together applications that were taking advantage of 100Mbps available speeds you wouldn’t locate it offshore because they would never be able to use it anyway, not because of any capacity shortfall but just because of the speed of light.”
Australia has had a well-documented multi-billion dollar data centre investment rush in recent years to partly help cater for this growing trend along with other factors such as replacing old facilities, cloud computing and simply to cater for the data flood many organisations are experiencing.
IBRS analyst James Turner notes that while there will always be offshore content, Australia could be well placed to act as a caching centre and disaster recover site.
“We are one per cent of the internet population of the world and already our saturation rate of the number of Australians online exceeds that of many other regions, which means overall our percentage of the internet population will be decreasing. That means there will always be more stuff elsewhere,” he said.
“There is definitely going to be an investment in bigger data centres in Australia. Part of it is going to be around the geo-location of data to comply with jurisdiction and people’s perceived concerns. But there is always going to be a demand to host stuff locally.”
This is also driven by the fact Australian ISPs continue to pay up to 17.5 times more for IP transit over international submarine cables than their international counterparts and with video traffic being data heavy they are looking to reduce costs while simultaneously improving the quality of service.
According to statistics provided to Computerworld Australia by analyst firm, TeleGeography, the median price paid by ISPs in Sydney for a fully committed gigabit Ethernet port to an upstream service provider for wholesale internet access in Q1 of 2010 was $US148.
In stark contrast, the same service in Miami (US) and Bucharest (Romania) was $US8, in Tokyo (Japan) $US33, in Taipei (Taiwan) $US45, in Lima (Peru) $US68, and in Mumbai (India) $US85.
That would certainly explain why big cloud computing providers the likes of Microsoft and Amazon are traditionally lax to support local centres.
But, when it comes to internet content - which is only one part of the whole broadband infrastructure debate – the question is whether we want to consume more than we do now going forward, and what the best infrastructure choice is to support those habits.
The statistics seem to suggest we will want more data – as we have pointed out previously – and the ISPs seem to think so also with several announcing vastly higher data plans in recent weeks; a trend that has continued unabated.
“Some ISPs are utilising a form of caching for video traffic now and they are getting 20 to 30 per cent improvements and that is what is leading to the consumer broadband market unlimited data push,” Cannon argued. “That is coming out of nowhere. Everyone is saying, international traffic equals bottleneck, but how come all of a sudden we have gone from 100GB of data to 1TB? We’ve gone ten-fold in data download limits and nothing has happened on international connectivity. How has that happened? It’s because of the caching solutions.”
Yes, people can use existing technologies to access a lot of this video. But not everyone can at a good level of service quality and at the same time as they are using multiple devices with multiple users on any one connection. And that is without factoring in the potential for multi-stream HD video or 3D video content.
Additionally, existing technologies are very much a one way street at the moment – i.e. upload speeds are poor and the incentive to create data-heavy content (such as HD video) is conspicuously absent - which one could argue is an inhibiting factor to fostering the digital economy.
Keeping in mind, again, that the internet content discussion is only one part of the whole broadband infrastructure debate and that many applications will be focussed on domestic traffic only, it is still reasonable to conclude a ubiquitous and scalable network with better upload speeds would very likely result in more people having more access to and potentially creating more internet content, while encouraging more local caching and thus faster/better delivery and service levels.
That said, and bringing the discussion back to submarine cables, there is a strong argument for including investment in submarine cables to help drive down the IP transit cost as part of any national broadband plan.
Next: Undersea cables aren’t that expensive