Akamai, France, and Caching

There was an exciting article more than on Light Reading yesterday by Craig Matsumoto, citing an business source who said that sometime final year Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) got into a tiff with three French ISPs, two of which had been supposedly Orange and SFR. Because the story goes, Akamai refused to pay even more and got the boot and had to serve information from the UK for a though, even though the disagreement was later resolved. An Akamai representative swiftly disputed the account in the comments following the article, but with out truly denying there was some sort of dust-up.obat amandel
The truth? We'll likely by no means know, as both sides have incentive to help keep quiet in the occasion of such disputes. Akamai wouldn't want to sound like their delivery speeds are at danger relative to their peers, and also the ISPs wouldn't want to publicize their efforts to acquire paid even more for delivering video bits. Level three is generating noise more than its dispute with Comcast, but they did so only though agreeing to pay beneath protest, and they are a tier-1 carrier with numerous leverage. But most such disputes fly beneath the radar anyway, and far even more of them occur than people comprehend.
obat amandel oa07
Nevertheless, I chalk up the reality that this story even exists as even more evidence that the partnership involving networks (CDN or transit) which serve the content providers and networks which serve consumers is beneath strain. I continue to sustain that this can be an inevitable migration of the network neutrality mess further up the chain of delivery, and it stands to adjust the current transit/peering/caching paradigm irreversibly more than the following few years.

The Level3/Comcast dispute is the most public instance not surprisingly, and how it turns out will set the tone going forward. Note that in the Akamai/France rumor, the CDN was described as falling back to serving information from the UK, most likely by way of transit connectivity. Delivery would have been slower, but the French ISPs would have observed the same visitors with no income - a bit of shared discomfort after which right after resolution a bit of shared benefit. Visualize if Comcast gets all it wants - that backup strategy may well have become significantly even more highly-priced to the CDN and not at all painful to the ISP.obat amandel oa08

Sooner or later, a dispute like this can be going to devolve into a network partition. That's when people will pay attention I guess.