No matter how fast you’re going on an expressway, it’s quicker to drive across the street than across the country. The same rule applies to the Internet superhighway: when you need content quickly, the closer it is to you at the start, the faster it can be delivered.
With the rise of streaming entertainment in American homes, companies like Comcast and Netflix, whose business models rely on streaming quality content, quickly recognized that while their customers in NFL cities were receiving fast and reliable connectivity via the companies’ large data centers in Tier 1 markets, those in Tier 2 or 3 cities weren’t quite as lucky, having to settle for slow speeds and poor performance as data travelled across the country’s Internet exchanges to reach them. Localization of data at the edge in order to bring it closer to end-users was the key to solving this problem.
Companies like EdgeConneX® lead innovation by bringing content to a new edge of the network. The company has been deploying high-power, neutral data center facilities in a number of Tier 2 and 3 markets to provide end-users with faster content delivery and better performance, while also reducing latency and transit costs for content providers. This cost-effective solution to enhanced performance was a breakthrough for the content delivery industry and quickly evolved to include not only MSOs, but the rest of the Internet community as well.
EdgeConneX launched its first Edge Data Center® in May of 2013 in Houston, Texas. Today, the company has increased its offering to 23 locations across the U.S., with two additional European markets coming online in Q1 2016. These Edge Data Centers now accommodate the largest cable companies turned content providers in the world. With content delivery dominating global networks, the majority of the broadband community quickly followed, and soon, EdgeConneX was hosting the world’s top content providers.
By creating a new Edge of the network and bringing content closer to end-users, EdgeConneX has created the infrastructure to bring the Internet ecosystem together, facilitating the successful, efficient and cost-effective delivery of quality content.
As data continues to proliferate, driven by innovations like the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing, the Internet has evolved to support it thanks to initiatives like edge expansion. Nowadays, we see many cloud providers attempting to host content closer to users. The financial industry also leverages the edge to support its new virtual banking model, leading to higher security requirements among providers. EdgeConneX, for example, is able to isolate customer networks from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and other security threats thanks to its distributed Edge Data Center footprint. The company’s Edge Data Centers are able to stay online and available to the consumer by automatically shifting compute resources to other sites in the event of an attack.
As more usage goes handheld and mobility increases, EdgeConneX is committing itself to working with customers to more effectively offload data content from the Internet backbone. The company plans to expand its Edge concept in Europe and South America, deploying 30+ unique facilities in 2016.
To learn more about the shift towards the Edge and predictions for the future of the Internet industry, don’t miss EdgeConneX’s Chief Architect and VP of Innovation, Phill Lawson-Shanks, present on the Cloud IoT Roundtable at PTC’16, taking place Sunday, January 17 at 3:30 PM.
To request a meeting with the EdgeConneX team during PTC’16, please email edgeconnex@imillerpr.com.
To learn more about EdgeConneX, please visit www.edgeconnex.com.