BT has signed up as the first customer of a new service from Cisco that aims to speed up internet video traffic through its networks.
The as-a-service offering is based on Open Caching, and has BT as its flagship customer. It has been developed by Cisco, Qwilt, and Digital Alpha, and will enable telcos to add multiple terabits per second of capacity and provide more cost-effective streaming video to meet growing demand.
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.
Neil McRae, chief architect, managing director for Architecture and Technology Strategy at BT said, “Our mission at BT is to ensure our customers have the best experience every time and with record levels of streaming we needed to disrupt the status quo. Qwilt’s pioneering open caching platform together with Cisco’s Cloud infrastructure gives BT the first 5G MEC capability in the UK to deliver premium quality video and on demand services.”
“Streaming video may be the killer app for the internet, but it doesn’t have to kill the internet,” added Jonathan Davidson, SVP and general manager, Mass Scale Infrastructure Group, Cisco.
“With streaming video expected to represent north of 80 per cent of traffic flowing through service provider networks in the coming years, content delivery is the first of potentially many services they can deploy from within to monetise their edge footprint in the 5G era. Marking this milestone together with Qwilt and Digital Alpha to enable edge cloud services for service providers, we can change the economics of the internet for the future, partnering with customers like BT to help them manage video traffic more effectively.”
