Bandwidth Banter

I'm often asked about CDNs and have endless debates about the three types of technologies deployed: P2P, edge caching and replication. Personally, I favour the latter, but if you really need an explanation of how they all work and what's for you, I'm afraid that it's going to involve some consultancy from me and my colleague Andi Parker.

Anyhow, Dan Rayburn has usefully posted the following list and links on his multitude of web blogs:

Advection.NET (stream, download)
Akamai (stream, download)
AT&T (stream, download)
BitGravity (stream, download)
BitTorrent (P2P)
CacheFly (download)
CacheLogic Changed name to Velocix (stream, download, P2P)
ChinaCache (stream, download)
CDNetworks (stream, download)
Digital Fountain (stream - launching Q1 2008)
EdgeCast (stream, download)
Grid Networks (P2P)
Highwinds (stream, download)
Ignite Technologies (P2P, download)
Internap (stream, download)
Itiva (P2P)
Level 3 (stream, download)
Limelight Networks (stream, download)
Mirror Image (stream, download)
Move Networks (streaming via HTTP)
NaviSite (stream, download)
Octoshape (P2P)
Pando Networks (P2P)
Panther Express (download)
PEER1 (download)
Rawflow (P2P)
Rinera (don't know)
Solid State Networks (P2P)
Swarmcast (streaming via HTTP)
VeriSign (stream, P2P)
Voxel.net (stream, download)

Now, I should add that the list is only partially useful and has omissions (Astream, AT&T, Narrowstep and Level 3 come to mind) and is somewhat inaccurate in my opinion. Nevertheless, it's good to see this market, which is crucial to the success of any Internet TV venture, being tracked.

Another useful statistic found on Dan's blog is the going rate for bandwidth. Unfortunately, this begins at 50c for 50TB - that's around 3 1/2 million viewers a month in my book. So, if you're serving under 3m viewers, expect higher rates...

Comments