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MDC Newsroom

1 Oct, 2018 3 minutes

As the name implies, a Content Delivery Network is a content distribution network, and its work to improve the speed of delivery of web content, however, in recent years, the CDN has grown their responsibilities. Companies expect that the CDN, in addition to improving delivery speed, optimize the routing of traffic through various networks (ISP, 3G, mobile devices), balancing the load according to peak demand times and ensuring security.

While we’ve heard a lot about them in recent years are not entirely new, Akamai® came into the industry twenty years ago as one of the first CDNs. Why two decades later there is so much impact in the industry? The growth of video consumption, the traffic coming from smartphones and the personalization of digital experiences have caused companies to experience heavy traffic in the network and look for a fast and reliable mechanism to deliver uninterrupted service.

Between 1998 and 2018 websites have undergone a next evolution, today they are more dynamic and heavy. A study conducted by Akamai® shows that web page load times for desktop computers increased by 63.8 percent in two years, from 7.2 seconds (2013) to 11.8 seconds (2015). While the average load time for mobile sites was much worse: 19 seconds in 3G connections.

The demand for video content, streaming, and dynamic (personalized) content continues to grow. Cisco says that in 2021 three billion minutes of video will be consumed monthly on a global scale, and the video will represent 80 percent of all Internet traffic. The Cisco study also reports that consumers demand more multi-screen services, streaming video / OTT and 4K / Ultra HD resolution. Dynamic content and bandwidth peaks are the new challenge for CDNs because twenty years later we are a long way from static cached content.

In September 2016, through its study “The Need for Mobile Speed,” Google discovered that 53 percent of visits to mobile sites are abandoned if the pages take more than three seconds to load. The data, based on the analysis of more than 10,000 mobile web domains, suggested that mobile sites that load in five seconds earn up to two times more revenue from mobile advertising than those whose sites load in 19 seconds.

The rapidity in the delivery of content is not only part of the experience of users of mobile devices, but it can also be the trigger of an economic catastrophe for companies. A one-second delay in the loading time of the Amazon website could burn $ 1.6 billion in sales. The acceleration of content for mobile devices has become a priority for CDNs.

The CDN market is growing, currently estimated at 5 billion dollars, but is expected to exceed $ 10 billion in 2019. It is crucial to find neutral data centers that have CDNs within their ecosystem because without certainly help distribute much of the Internet content and connect with them will significantly improve the user experience and help companies reduce their costs.