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Over the last year or so the company I run moved some content delivery workloads from a CDN onto our own network. So now we have something like 100Gbit/s of tot

Over the last year or so the company I run moved some content delivery workloads from a CDN onto our own network. So now we have something like 100Gbit/s of total external bandwidth. The next thought in my addled brain is that since we only really use the egress side of it, perhaps some of our neighbors would enjoy affordable 10G internet access…

grahamburger 5y ago
(Author here) Maybe possible to figure out a way to use this. The problem is the people using it would still need transport to your network, which in practice can cost as much or nearly as much as direct DIA to their location. The reverse here is maybe interesting too - a lot of WISPs have a bunch of spare 'upload' (from their perspective) bandwidth available, and by definition it's very geographically distributed, maybe that would be of use to CDNs? I'd love to chat more about this if you're interested. Email in my profile.
- toast0 5y ago
  The tricky bit is that a CDN doesn't really want geographic distribution so much as to be close to network distribution points. If a WISP's customers aren't enough to warrant a CDN node and their internet backhaul is fiber to a not particularly nearby internet exchange point, there's not a whole lot of benefit to the CDN to be at the WISP rather than the internet exchange. It might be different if the WISP has connections to local residential ISPs that aren't well connected to local internet exchanges (or there nearest internet exchange isn't very near) so the WISP facility offers a way to get (network) closer to more users. I could also see some potential for mixing traffic streams between a WISP (or several) and a CDN to try to balance traffic flows enough to qualify for peering with networks with restrictive peering policies; however, they also often have geographic requirements that might be harder to meet.
  - grahamburger 5y ago
    Thanks, this helps to confirm what I've always expected from my end (the wisp side.) It sure seems like a good match at a high level but seems to fall apart once we get in to the details of making it work.

grahamburger 5y ago

(Author here) Maybe possible to figure out a way to use this. The problem is the people using it would still need transport to your network, which in practice can cost as much or nearly as much as direct DIA to their location. The reverse here is maybe interesting too - a lot of WISPs have a bunch of spare 'upload' (from their perspective) bandwidth available, and by definition it's very geographically distributed, maybe that would be of use to CDNs? I'd love to chat more about this if you're interested. Email in my profile.

toast0 5y ago
The tricky bit is that a CDN doesn't really want geographic distribution so much as to be close to network distribution points. If a WISP's customers aren't enough to warrant a CDN node and their internet backhaul is fiber to a not particularly nearby internet exchange point, there's not a whole lot of benefit to the CDN to be at the WISP rather than the internet exchange. It might be different if the WISP has connections to local residential ISPs that aren't well connected to local internet exchanges (or there nearest internet exchange isn't very near) so the WISP facility offers a way to get (network) closer to more users. I could also see some potential for mixing traffic streams between a WISP (or several) and a CDN to try to balance traffic flows enough to qualify for peering with networks with restrictive peering policies; however, they also often have geographic requirements that might be harder to meet.
- grahamburger 5y ago
  Thanks, this helps to confirm what I've always expected from my end (the wisp side.) It sure seems like a good match at a high level but seems to fall apart once we get in to the details of making it work.