Qwest launches content-delivery services

(Telephony) Qwest Communications has launched a three-pronged content delivery services attack that uses end-to-end networking technologies from Cisco.

Qwest's Intelligent Content Environment [ICE] is "something that we've been going at all along," said Rod Nayfield, the carrier’s director of IP innovation. He added that with flagging market conditions, "people are much more receptive now. There's some additional growth, some acceleration of demand when people are looking to remove costs from their balance sheets and reduce their capital outlays."

The first prong optimizes Web server performance with load balancing, the ability to switch content between multiple locations and geographic fault tolerance.

Qwest uses Cisco technology to "layer on top of our existing hosting infrastructure" with a "customer-specific dedicated device that allows the customer's set of Web servers to be balanced between a local fashion, a wide area load-balancing fashion or firewall load-balancing," Nayfield said.

The second prong, a pre-packaged solution that supports static and rich media content in a dynamic usage-based model, "is actually an outsourced infrastructure management," Nayfield said. "We're actually distributing content for the customer, as opposed to the first service, which is augmenting the customer's infrastructure."

This step, he said, relieves companies of the responsibility of building large infrastructures to move content between themselves and their customers.

"There are a lot of companies that have content that they want to put out on the Internet for people to get, but they're not necessarily in the distribution business," Nayfield said.

The third prong is "an evolutionary step within our hosting architecture," he said. "We're adding a level of outsourcing to the ability to distribute content on the Internet."

Qwest will help customers manage servers deployed on their local LAN so they can download content in advance and then serve it locally or in a live event.

"They can take in a single live stream and multiplex it so that 20 users can watch that live stream with only 300K of bandwidth being used into that location," Nayfield said.

Qwest is the "first major tier one service provider who has elected to go with Cisco on an end-to-end basis," said Chen Wu, vice president/general manager of Cisco's Content Networking Business Unit. "This is a natural extension of the core business they want to evolve into, expanding from the transport business which they have a dominant position in."