SAN JOSE AND REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – Cisco, Qwilt and Digital Alpha (DA) announced today how together they are disrupting the commercial Content Delivery Network (CDN) market with a new as-a-service offering based on Open Caching, with BT as the flagship customer.

Streaming content is increasingly delivered in 4K and soon 8K, supporting augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) applications across multiple devices, over wireline and wireless connections. This drives network capacity demands, with consumer internet video traffic expected to comprise 82% of all (consumer) internet traffic by 2022, (up from 73% in 2017.)

Resulting performance requirements are accelerating the shift away from traditional content delivery models, opening up the opportunity for service providers to use their edge assets to deploy their own distributed CDN capabilities and become more active participants in the streaming media delivery value chain.

Open Caching, an open architecture developed and endorsed by the Streaming Video Alliance, offers a platform that federates content delivery infrastructure deployed deep inside service provider networks, into a global CDN with open APIs for content publishers. It is designed to help service providers easily deploy an edge CDN footprint, offering them more control over content flows. It also caters to the needs of global and regional content providers for more capacity, consistency in content delivery and performance assurance.

Featuring Digital Alpha as the investing partner providing a unique funding solution, this partnership combines Qwilt's innovative content delivery platform based on Open Caching, with Cisco's edge compute and networking infrastructure to deliver the solution as-a-service to service providers of all sizes around the world.

BT, the UK's leading telecommunications and network provider, in partnership with Qwilt, Cisco and DA has deployed this solution to add multiple terabits per second of capacity and provide cost-effective, high-quality streaming video to meet its growing demand in 2020 and beyond.

Its decision to make the transition to Open Caching is based on the following requirements:

Industry and streaming ecosystem support for Open Caching is growing, with over 50 global service providers, technology vendors and content publishers actively involved in moving the content delivery industry in this direction.

Read the full announcement here.

Qwilt
Digital Alpha
Cisco