Cisco, Qwilt to enhance content delivery for Windstream’s Kinetic Network
Cisco and Qwilt have partnered to combine edge computing solutions that provide enhanced streaming performance for Windstream’s Kinetic Network in North America. As part of the partnership, Cisco edge computing and networking infrastructure will integrate with Qwilt edge cloud for content delivery. According to the companies, this collaboration will improve the quality and efficiency of live and on-demand content. The solution increases Kinetic’s network delivery capacity throughout the United States for several forms of media content.
Cisco says it chose the Qwilt edge cloud solution to support increasing data volumes and improve the streaming experience within Windstream’s Kinetic content delivery network. Kinetic deployed the Qwilt open caching solution over 170,000 miles of fiber network across the United States to address the growing number of live streaming events.
“By partnering with Qwilt and Cisco, we’re ensuring our fiber-backed network has the scalability and capacity needed to handle the growth in demand for all forms of streaming content,” said Gary Cooke, senior vice president of engineering for Kinetic. “By integrating innovative edge technologies across our network, we’re bringing high-quality content closer to our customers than ever before.”
Open caching is based on an open architecture from the Streaming Video Technology Alliance that offers an interoperable content delivery infrastructure platform for service provider networks. For content publishers, the technology integrates security features and protections for improved performance and greater coverage. The deployment creates a solid telco cloud foundation for future applications, according to alliance members. Open caching technology is intended to help service providers can address the growing capacity, secure content delivery and enhance the performance of global and regional content providers.
“Through Cisco and Qwilt’s united vision, we empower service providers like Kinetic by Windstream to do more with their assets while accelerating their digital transformations,” said Alon Maor, CEO and co-founder of Qwilt. “We look forward to helping modernize the way Kinetic delivers content and ready their growing network for the future of content experiences.”
Last year Qwilt received funding from Cisco Investments to help advance its edge cloud service provider goals to create high-performing content delivery networks with global service providers.
Analysis
Content delivery is one of the earliest use cases for edge computing. The technology has been around for decades now; what’s different in 2022? After some failed efforts between service providers and companies like Cisco, organizations like the Streaming Video Technology Alliance and vendors like Qwilt have laid the groundwork for interoperability between the delivery infrastructure of different companies.
There hasn’t been much in the way of business relationships between service providers like Windstream, and, for example, Comcast that would create a quasi-Akamai competitor, but there has been progress in creating interfaces that help content owners publish to different CDNs. Looking ahead, the group is also working on AR/VR use cases and how those will leverage modern edge computing services.
Article Topics
Akamai | caching | CDN | Cisco | interoperability | OTT | Qwilt | video | Windstream
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