Running The Middle Mile

Cable World, May 1, 2000 by Matt Stump

Matt Stump talks with Paul Sagan, who has a long history in the cable business. With Pathfinder and NY1, he helped create "the first mile," i.e. Web site content. With Road Runner, he helped create "the last mile." Now, as COO of Akamai Technologies Inc., he's building "the middle mile," enabling content providers to stream content and applications to end users across the Internet.

CW: What is the focus of Akamai Technologies?

Our business is insuring the high performance and complete reliability of the delivery of Internet content, streaming media and applications. The old way of running a Web site -- locating it in one place and blasting content out on the Internet to end users -- was the way people had to start. But it won't work long-term to turn the Web into a 24-7 marketplace for information, entertainment etc. It wasn't designed for that.

The irony is you have the world's most global medium served in the most provincial way. Magazines and newspapers are printed in multiple plants. NBC relies on 200 plus affiliates to transmit ER Thursdays at 10 p.m. Cable relies on many MSOs and thousands of headends to insure we can all get what we want.

Now you have the first truly global, real-time medium served in the most provincial way, often from one physical location. It's not the right way. It won't work. It won't scale.

What Akamai has done through some breakthrough research done at MIT is to develop a way to finesse the architecture. You're not going to rip up pipe and rebuild it. We finesse this congestion that's created by all these interconnecting networks by locating our own servers at the edge of the Internet. Today, we've deployed over 2,700 servers in more than 45 countries on more than 150 networks.

What we do for e-businesses is move their content, streaming media and applications on to our network at the edges, then serve it to end users. It requires extremely complicated technology. But it's implemented in a way that's very simple for our customers.

We're celebrating the first anniversary of the launch of our first commercial service, FreeFlow of Content Delivery. We have more than 400 customers and 550 major Web properties running on our network. Apple, Fox Sports, CBS, Nike, Paramount, Microsoft and Lycos are using our network for the delivery of streaming media because of its great reliability and high quality.

CW: What mount of streaming media `are you doing a day? Can you calibrate it into hours?

We haven't released the numbers that way. SportsLine said it had a peak of close to 20,000 simultaneous streams with "March Madness." That was a single customer. The size and scale of our network is larger than anything that's ever been built. We believe it's the largest deployed network for the delivery of Web content and applications.

CW: What percentage of the networks do you own, vs. lease?

We don't own any physical network. The servers are ours. We don't build concrete or dig trenches. We simple co-locate our servers at points of presence on more than 150 networks, which are everything from Internet backbone providers to regional ISPs and PTTs in foreign countries. We create a network on top of the existing Internet infrastructure. Because of our unique technology we can do it in a way that's completely distributed and fault tolerant. There's no central control.

In a traditional network, usually there's a point of failure somewhere. There is no single point of failure on our network because there's no single point of control, no nerve center. The network responds and makes traffic decisions on its own. It always can find the best route at any time to move content.

CW: How do you decide where to put servers?

We're deploying 200 servers a month. We look for additional networks, or within networks where we are; we make deployments closer to ends users.

Our performance is enhanced every time we get closer to where people connect to the Internet.

CW: What percentage of your end user base is residental vs. business?

It varies. We have a mix of customers. It runs the gamut from Apple to Yahoo!. There are e-commerce and financial services like NASDAQ, Marthastewartliving.com to Brittanica. Traffic of our customers routed across our network reaches virtually every Internet user.

CW: How do you interface with @Home and RoadRunner?

We have relationships with Road Runner and a number of DSL players. In those cases, we locate our servers within their networks, which gets us very close to end users and allows us to have the best possible performance.

Where we don't have deployments, we're probably sitting right outside where they interconnect to the Internet. We do have a cross network strategy. It's critical to be in as many networks as possible because users are in so many.

CW: How much of the content market that's available to date have you sewn up?

We have quite a variety of entertainment and media companies. We have 9 of the 10 top search portals. ABC through go.com, CBS, NBCi, Fox Sports, Paramount Digital.

Most of the major studios use us. So we've really penetrated the high profile sites. That's still a very small piece of the overall Web activity. We've got a lot of work to do in bringing on more and more companies to our network.