The Internet content delivery market will undergo huge changes over the next decade as major telcos and Internet giants — including Google, Amazon, Netflix and Microsoft — wrangle over the continuing over-the-top (OTT) Internet traffic content boom, according to a new Informa Telecoms & Media report Internet Innovation.
The Internet Innovation report details how the Internet giants are trying to fulfill their ambitions of becoming globally dominant digital content providers by building their own Internet infrastructure that will provide them with low-cost high-quality digital content distribution.
Google, Amazon, Netflix and Microsoft are working towards delivering their digital content in premium condition to their customers using techniques such as edge caching on operator networks and using Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). By building out their own extensive Internet distribution networks, these Internet giants also hope to alleviate the telcos’ pain over traffic volumes and push aside the growing calls from some operators for OTT players to pay volume-based wholesale charges for the traffic they send to local-access networks.
Major European operators — including Orange, Vodafone and Telefonica — have been particularly vocal in calling for the introduction of wholesale charges based on the volume of data traffic passing through their networks. However, the Internet Innovation report concludes that there are several reasons why calls for a more formal model for charging large content providers will be unsuccessful, including a lack of universal support and the growing deployment of new technologies for OTT-traffic management.
Instead, the Internet Innovation report concludes that the next decade will see the emergence of multiple commercial and technological arrangements for managing the relationship between telcos and content providers, including bandwidth-management strategies, content caching and delivery technologies.
The Internet Innovation report (www.informatandm.com/internetinnovation) assesses the opportunities and challenges facing content providers, telcos and other Internet network operators as they seek to manage the future of online content delivery.