When I was on my twenties, I was deeply impressed by Bill Gates’s Book, “Business @The Speed of Thought”. At the time, he was talking about the internet and its impact on doing business.
It is safe to say that today we are “Living” @ The speed of Thought.
We watch videos online, we listen to music, we play games, we shop online, we book hotels, and we use many apps using internet at the background.
To enable faster way of living, CDN (Content Delivery Network) Companies work day and night to enable faster internet by using compression algorithms, by using machine learning, by hardware optimizations, by caching and by using smart routing and load balancing.
This is no simple task and definitely needs support from the telecom operators.
As you can read in this news article of the Capacity Middle East panel of last week, I personally covered this topic. But now, I would like to highlight some more points.
“First, local users needs to be served from local servers”
As Medianova, we do this in Turkey for many years. Riot Games’ League of Legends is played more due to faster downloads. Turkcell’s music service “Fizy” just passed Spotify which is still streamed from Europe. Fox and Bloomberg are watched more and have more advertising spots. E-commerce companies like Trendyol, Hepsiburada, Gittigidiyor (EBAY), Morhipo have much faster load times and more organic SEO traffic.
All this is done with Medianova CDN Platform and integrations to operators like Turk Telekom, Turkcell, Vodafone and Turk.net
The analysis done with Catchpoint.com (3rd party monitoring platform) shows that Twitter could be from 6 to 65 times faster in Turkey if it was served from local servers of Medianova CDN instead of European nodes.
“Second, faster internet means more revenues for the Telco”
Nowadays, It is no secret that operators are growing more by selling data instead of selling voice plans. Faster web, flawless video services, better games mean more usage and more revenues for the operator. Also, operators can sell wholesale FOC (Free Of –data- Charge) integrations to content owners enabling even more usage and more revenues.
On top of these, users who are more than satisfied with their internet service provider are less likely to leave it. All of these facts ensures a strong business value to embrace faster internet goal.
“Third and the last, the dream of Living @The Speed of Thought is an ecosystem issue”
It is an indisputable fact that there is no company who can solve it all.
At Medianova, we believe that if we are after faster internet dream, we need to work hand in hand with operators. We can think global but we have to act local.
In other words, faster internet dream can not be achieved with only the CDN’s efforts and technology. Operators also need to support CDNs and see them as a mission critical partner instead of a simple potential customer.
With this in mind, peering is crucial for the Middle East region in UAE-IX as it is in Dec-ix Istanbul.
Performance analytics based on Real User Monitoring (RUM) company Cedexis shows that Medianova is the fastest CDN in Turkey (See: https://portal.cedexis.com/ui/reports/share/1hinr672shz4 ) and now in the top three in the Middle East. These calculations are done for each end user and they are the most innovative way of monitoring performance.
The fact that Medianova is faster than Akamai (of course much faster that other global CDNs) in Turkey shows the value of focusing on Peering, CDN software, %100 SSL and SSD backbone, hardware optimizations and smart network routing.