Light Reading reports that AT&T plans to leverage its extensive network reach in order to improve its position competing against content delivery companies like Akamai and Limelight.
According to the article, AT&T plans to add content servers to its internet data centres around the world, providing a sixfold increase in its caching and live streaming capabilities by the end of 2008.
AT&T’s group president of global business services Ron Spears, said:
In very short order, we will have the ability and all of the asset capacity necessary to optimally deliver and host content in the needed formats with the superior quality of service that our customers demand.
Yesterday’s post referred to a paper published by Hal Singer of Criterion Economics. That paper discusses a Quality of Service (QoS) service, purchased by many online video game providers, that could be placed at risk by net neutrality legislation.
For example, Sony produces EverQuest, a three-dimensional, fantasy, massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that requires users to pay a recurring monthly fee. For a time, EverQuest was the most popular MMORPG in the industry. Blizzard Entertainment produces World of Warcraft, another MMORPG set in a fantasy environment. As of September 2006, World of Warcraft had almost 7 million active subscriptions worldwide.
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To achieve the best possible fantasy environment for their online gaming websites, Sony and Blizzard place their servers in idcs owned by broadband service providers around the world. They simply cannot afford for the players of their games to experience jitter.
Ron Spears is a past keynote presenter at The Canadian Telecom Summit. We will be exploring Net Neutrality from all angles at The 2008 Canadian Telecom Summit in June.