Fresh, fast and piping hot

Service providers want to dish up the Web the way Domino's does pizza: fast, fresh and with a delivery guarantee.

CacheFlow is moving out of beta tests with the second version of its CacheOS Internet accelerator-which will permit Internet service providers to verify whether Web content coming from their caching products is the most up-to-date and offer service level agreements that incorporate both speed and freshness of Internet access, said Kelly Herrell, vice president of marketing.

A recent Forrester Research study showed that the two most potent attractions of a Web site were its download speed and the frequency with which it changed content. "If you have two equivalent Web sites-say, for news-and CNN downloads more quickly than CBS, the invisible hand of the market will drive more traffic to CNN," said Herrell. But fast access to stale data is no quality-of-service improvement. CacheOS-which Herrell insists is really an "Internet accelerator," not a cache-is an operating system that includes both caching subsystems and software algorithms that reduce latency.

The main impediment to improving Web page response time in a cached network occurs when the cache has to go back across the Internet to get requested data from the host server.

There are two types of cache "misses": a request for something the cache doesn't have at all and one for something it doesn't have the latest version of. In the first case, most cache products perform synchronous downloads-that is, they make the user wait while they go back and request each item on a Web page. That usually involves a separate round trip across the Internet for each item on a page. But CacheOS uses a technique called "pipelining" that opens up parallel connections to the server and downloads almost everything in one pull, improving performance by a factor of two.

Cache OS also models each individual object on a Web page, sometimes as many as 40 objects per page. Some of those objects change every five minutes-for example, the lead story on the CNN page on a busy news day. Others such as the CNN logo don't change much at all. CacheOS studies each independently modeled object and builds a probability pattern of change in that object back at the server. The cache then adjusts to stop refreshing the logo to spend more time pinging the CNN server for the lead story, making it more likely that the objects in the cache are the freshest content. Herrell compares it to a grocery store dairy aisle, where the delivery trucks keep dropping off new product at the back so that customers get an uninterrupted supply of milk.

CacheOS's newest version, available May 1, offers Web-based metrics for the freshness of the content it provides. ISPs can let both content providers and end users check the refresh rates over the last hour, day or month as part of a service level agreement to keep Web content current. By keeping track of the freshness checks for an object, CacheFlow can calculate the percentage of previous deliveries of that object that were "stale," giving the ISP the option to offer some sort of make-good.

"Caching will become the next important part of the Internet infrastructure to get attention," said Rich Ramallye, an analyst with Systems Telecom. "They are now where routers were a few years ago. Service providers are looking at ways to make them more effective in getting around the growing congestion of the Internet. CacheFlow's version 2 offers a way to do this and the metrics to illustrate it, and that should help ISPs differentiate themselves in the market."

250,000TH ROAD RUNNER CUSTOMER Road Runner reached the 250,000-subscriber mark shortly before the end of the first quarter, the company announced. Most of those are clustered in the Northeast, with Portland, Maine, reporting more than a 14.5% penetration of homes passed. Systemwide, Road Runner now passes 8 million homes.

INTERPHASE LAUNCHES LONG-DISTANCE IP VOICE Connectivity vendor Interphase will sell international long-distance telephony, including voice over IP, to retail and corporate customers through a new subsidiary, Zirca.com. The next generation telco will route traffic through both traditional voice networks and its own IP-based network, depending on the international destination.