Online Video is Causing Seismic Shifts in Internet Traffic

The topology of the internet is changing, and online video is at the heart of the change. At the recent Content Delivery Summit in New York City, Craig Labovitz, co-founder of DeepField Networks, presented the results of years of research.

"It's really been a remarkable transition over just the last five years," noted Labovitz. "The internet is evolving in ways that look nothing like the fundamental architecture -- how the networks interconnect, where the POPs are located, how the traffic is distributed across a backbone is completely different and changing rapidly."

What we're seeing isn't just a change to recent networking architecture, but to the standard that started long before the internet.

"For 150 years of telephony, of telegraph, the architecture of the network basically looked the same: very hierarchical. You had regional networks -- small little regional networks -- you had them feeding up into larger PTTs [postal telephone and telegraph], national networks. And the way traffic flowed through the network, the way interconnections worked, the way that money worked was all very similar," explained Labovitz. "It all flowed one direction and traffic went down the other. But things over the last five years really began to change quickly."

What we're seeing in an entirely new model, one flat where the previous was top-down.

"The old hierarchical internet is gone. Today, we're increasingly moving to a very flat, dense, highly interconnected network where, in fact, most of the traffic isn't flowing up along [a] tree to reach the tier 1s and back down. Most of the traffic today is interchange between what we've been calling the hyper-giants," said Labovitz.

For the full study results, watch the video below and download Labovitz's presentation.

CDN and Over-The-Top Traffic Data

In one of the largest studies of its kind, DeepField Networks will report on growth in CDN traffic, over-the-top services and other sources of consumer video across multiple providers. Data will be presented from a study of a hundred providers around the world as well as their recent work analyzing traffic patterns across several million subscribers in North America. This presentation explores seismic, ongoing shifts in Internet traffic demands and underlying network architecture as well as a discussion of evolving provider peering and CDN strategies.

Craig Labovitz, Co-Founder, DeepField Networks