Why Qwilt is driving the era of the unified edge cloud

Edge technology, encompassing computing, cloud services, and distribution, is central to today’s tech discourse. Among these applications, content distribution via the edge demonstrates clear advantages. However, it’s important to recognize that edge solutions are not a one-size-fits-all for all IT services. The current popularity of edge is part of a technological pendulum swing between networking performance of networking and compute versus the impact of latency.

Here’s a quick history lesson:

• 1960s: The first supercomputers were at the edge, often within research campuses, using punch cards and tape for computation.
• 1970s: Arpanet marked the birth of the internet, shifting processing away from the edge to the network center.
• 1980s: The rise of low-cost IBM desktop PCs brought a conceptual return to the edge with compute, storage, and applications.
• 1990s: The internet gained prominence, and SaaS applications flourished, spanning edge (PCs), mid-range (data centers), and core.
• 2000s: Broadband and mobile devices led to the dominance of hyperscalers and public clouds, creating a complex compute environment.

The oscillation between edge and centralized processing, closely tied to networking capacity, cost, and performance, is slowing as both computing and networking confront the limitations of physics and escalating costs.

CDNs: The first ‘killer app” for the edge

The current era has renewed focus on certain edge use cases, notably content distribution networks (CDNs). Qwilt stands out as the best CDN in terms of performance because all content from our publisher customers is served from edge caches inside our operator partner networks. This approach avoids upstream congestion and eliminates the wasteful duplicate streams transiting from peering points across telecom partner networks.

To illustrate, imagine a parcel delivery service with 10 trucks delivering 10 parcels from a distribution hub outside the city to 10 houses on the same street, compared to one truck holding all the parcels just a block away, making the trip just once. From a content caching standpoint, Qwilt is the latter example, while many other CDNs operate like the former. This efficiency is vital, especially given the need for significant delivery capacity to meet peak demand in the media and entertainment industry.

Looking ahead: The Unified Edge Cloud Advantage

The concept of the unified edge holds significant promise. Ani Keshishyan, Senior Consultant at STL Partners, an analyst firm that has been deep within the edge concept since 2017, defines the unified or federated telco edge as “the process of interconnecting operator edge platforms to enable the consistent delivery of edge computing services across networks and national boundaries.”

Imagine a scenario where a content provider deploys a media streaming application worldwide. They could build it with BT in the UK and replicate it on the Telefonica Edge in Spain, Comcast in the US, Deutsche Telecom in Germany, KT in Korea, etc. Each node would be centrally managed, ensuring lower latency, compliance with local data privacy requirements, and efficient bandwidth usage.

A unified platform with common APIs, standards, and billing allows ISPs to scale up and down almost on demand, earning revenue from unified apps running on nodes within their network. Qwilt has deployed a unified edge cloud with open APIs at 180 operators, reaching 2 billion subscribers, with more nodes rolling out over the next 24 months.

Comcast joins the Open Caching movement

As Qwilt’s Open Caching momentum continues to accelerate, we mark a significant milestone this week in announcing our partnership with Comcast, one of the world’s largest media and technology organizations.

Our edge cloud service in Comcast’s network is live and running already across the U.S., and the ongoing roll-out will progressively ramp up to include support for OTT third-party content and delivery of NBCUniversal (NBCU) content to Comcast subscribers in the U.S. and globally. The partnership creates the most distributed CDN in the U.S., with many Tbps of capacity and hundreds of edge cache nodes deployed throughout the Comcast network. Watch this space.

The Open Edge is here today!

Qwilt’s first edge application has been commercially available as our Open Edge CDN for many years. If tomorrow a new publisher worked with Qwilt and asked, “Can you deploy a content delivery application accessible with the lowest latency in 46 countries?” we have the tools to cache and deliver content within any of our 180 operator partner networks, providing local compute, storage, and networking. Qwilt can create global availability and capacity management across multiple national and regional operators, scaling capacity by activating new nodes as needed. Qwilt has been building its international network of more than 1000 CDN PoPs by striking partnerships with network operators for years, building a global presence through relationships with companies such as Vodafone, Telefónica, Airtel, Cirion and many more.

While others in the CDN space are moving into the edge, definitions vary, and not all edges are created equally. Some define the ‘edge’ as their own data center at or near a peering point rather than inside the operator network. This other ‘edge’ is further away from the last mile, incurs a latency penalty, and burdens operators with carrying redundant traffic across their access network.

As the pendulum of technology swings back towards the perimeter, the spotlight on edge computing intensifies, particularly in use cases like edge-based video gaming, where low latency is critical. Complaints about high egress charges from public clouds underscore the significance of edge solutions that reduce hyperscaler cloud egress by performing compute tasks inside the service provider edge, closer to end users.