We’re fortunate enough to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver the video on our website. Essentially, it gets us out of hosting the video but more than that, it should make the experience better for our users due to some digitalmagicary. Our videos are hosted on a geographic sensing network which figures out where you are and what the quickest route to you is, based on a network of caching servers.

For example, let’s say we post a new video on our master host, which is in Los Angeles, and you are browsing our videos from London. The CDN will cache that video to the server in London from which you stream it. Then let’s say a bloke in Paris selects the same video, the network will figure out that its probably quicker to stream it from the London cache with less connections and so hopefully a better experience. A CDN speeds up delivery and ensures a smoother playback but it also mitigates network outages or disruption.

We only use it for delivering streaming video but the network can be used as a cache for your entire website, which in the extreme would allow you to host your website on a very low-end server, but serve it to the network for high demand or availability. We use the Akamai network but there are others, and even some academic ones – where I found an historical society site using it.

Akamai produce a quarterly report on The State of the Internet, which “provides data gathered across their global server network about attack traffic and broadband adoption, as well as trends, news and notable events.” It takes a special person to be interested in the report overall, but there is some interesting trend data and stories. Akamai’s customer list is impressive, including Amazon, Apple, Yahoo and MySpace, so their data is a good representation of what’s going on.

From their 1st Quarter Report, 2008:

South Korea had the highest measured levels of “high broadband” (>5 Mbps) connectivity. In the United States, Delaware topped the list, with over 60% of connections to Akamai occurring at 5 Mbps or greater. At the other end of the bandwidth spectrum, Rwanda and the Solomon Islands topped the list of slowest countries, with 95% or more of the connections to Akamai from both countries occurring at below 256 Kbps. In the United States, Washington State and Virginia turned in the highest percentages of sub-256 Kbps connections. However, in contrast to the international measurements, these states only saw 21% and 18% of connections below 256 Kbps respectively.

…attack traffic originated from 125 unique countries around the world. China and the United States were the two largest attack traffic sources, accounting for some 30% of this traffic in total. Akamai observed attack traffic targeted at 23 unique network ports. Many of the ports that saw the highest levels of attack traffic were targeted by worms, viruses, and bots that spread across the Internet several years ago.

…approximately 2% of all inter-domain Internet traffic was a distributed denial-of-service attack traffic.

A number of major network “events” occurred during the first quarter that impacted millions of Internet users. Cable cuts in the Mediterranean Sea severed Internet connectivity between the Middle East and Europe, drastically slowing communications. Cogent’s de-peering of Telia impacted Internet communications for selected Internet users in the United States and Europe for a two-week period. A routing change by Pakistan Telecom that spread across the Internet essentially took YouTube, a popular Internet video sharing site, offline for several hours.

In February 2008, an Indian anti-virus firm was the target of a hack that exploited an iFrame vulnerability to install the Virut virus onto insufficiently patched Windows systems that visited the hacked pages.13 Such exploits have come to be known as “drive-by” downloads, as a user’s system can become infected by simply visiting a hacked Web page.

Perhaps the most noteworthy Internet outage in the first quarter of 2008 resulted from several undersea cables in the Mediterranean Sea being severed. Two cables were severed in late January, and two more went out of service in early February. These cable cuts significantly impacted Internet connectivity into and out of countries in the Middle East. The two cables account for the majority of international communications capacity between Europe and the Middle East, and the cuts reduced bandwidth between the region and Europe by 75%.

In April 2008, Reliance Globalcom used satellite imagery to identify two ships that were in the area of the original cable cuts, and that had improperly dropped anchor in the area. The owners of one of the ships paid $60,000 in damages to compensate for repairs, while the second ship was impounded in Dubai.

I guess someone’s always watching…

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