Reliance Communications (RCOM) and its subsidiary Global Cloud Xchange (GCX) have launched India’s first “Make in India” Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Named Fast Edge, the CDN is designed to take “Digital India” from promise to fruition.
“India’s Internet User growth is accelerating at more than 40% year over year and India has surpassed the USA to become the #2 Global User Market behind China,” according to the Global Internet Trend 2016 report by Mary Meeker, KPCM.
With the increasing number of OTT, Gaming and New Media companies targeting India’s 350 million+ eyeballs, demand is rapidly growing for improved response time, reduced risk of malicious attacks, improved visibility of control over traffic flows, and reduced risk of network capacity bottlenecks. These requirements are posing challenges, especially for third party CDN providers that only have infrastructure at regional hubs far from where growth is exploding.
“Fast Edge comprises a Content Delivery Network of content caches around the edge of Reliance’s Indian network, connecting back to nine state-of-the-art Tier III+ data centres in Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad,” said Bill Barney, CEO of RCOM (Enterprise) & GCX. “The content caches, in turn, are seamlessly connected onward to our network of data centres situated in key hubs along the Emerging Markets Corridor, all interconnected by our wholly owned global subsea fibre network.”
Open-source cache servers hosted in Reliance / GCX MPLS PoPs throughout India mean content of all types, including social media, data, video and gaming, can now be served from the very same neighbourhood in which the people accessing it are based.
“By building Fast Edge across the length and breadth of the Reliance network, the distance for content to travel to the eyeball can be slashed from 5,000 miles to 10 miles, effectively eradicating the middle mile bottleneck,” said Braham Singh, SVP of Product Management, RCOM (Enterprise) and GCX. “Because the content is cached and delivered across our local network, any rapid exponential growth in the number of users concurrently accessing will not automatically lead to middle mile bandwidth issues. In other words, content can now go “viral” across India without impact on users.”
