Blue Coat Systems announced that CallPlus, a prominent Independent Service Provider (ISP) for businesses and consumers in New Zealand, as selected Blue Coat CacheFlow 5000 appliances to help manage the large and growing demand of its customers for Internet content from outside New Zealand.
The consumer customers of CallPlus that use the company’s Slingshot-branded Internet service as well as its business customers have demonstrated an increasing demand for rich Web 2.0 content, particularly video, from international sources such as YouTube, Facebook and other sites.
CallPlus estimates that 90-95 percent of its traffic is for international content, and the demand is growing at a rate of about 50 percent per year, by volume.
CallPlus has faced the dual challenge of keeping its subscribers happy by providing a fast, high quality Internet experience and the need to reduce its operational costs due to escalating consumption demands for expensive international Internet bandwidth.
In keeping with its practice of ongoing service innovation and improvement, CallPlus selected the CacheFlow 5000 appliances to address both. Slingshot customers can experience faster downloads and Web page loading and smoother, more quickly delivered video.
Initial trials of the Blue Coat Web caching appliances conducted by CallPlus showed a reduction in its bandwidth consumption by over 40 percent. At the same time, the speed of content delivery and quality of video experience increased dramatically due to the use of caching.
“Once we deployed the caching technology, we were serving Web traffic considerably faster than our main competitors. Blue Coat provided a solution that both reduced costs and improved customer experience; it was the only solution to meet our payback hurdle,” said Adrian Dick, chief technology officer, CallPlus.
CacheFlow appliances alleviate the current bind facing service providers: scaling to serve fast-growing customer demand for rich Web 2.0 and video content with high expectations for a fast and interactive Web experience, and containing the spiraling costs for bandwidth.
Through the use of next-generation caching technologies and the intelligence of the Blue Coat CachePulse cloud, CacheFlow appliances efficiently cache Web content to substantially reduce bandwidth consumption, and to boost the quality of Internet experience, leading loyal and more satisfied subscribers and greater competitive differentiation for the service provider.
With CacheFlow appliances deployed in service provider networks, subscribers experience faster response time and better usage characteristics, including smooth, uninterrupted video playback.
The appliances also act as a “shock absorber” to address traffic spikes that occur when Web sites and content become popular over a very short period of time, such as during coverage of a major news, sporting or political event.
In addition, CacheFlow appliances provide protection from malware and unusual traffic as well as URL filtering to meet cultural and regulatory requirements.
“The experience from CallPlus demonstrates the ability of CacheFlow 5000 appliances to dramatically reduce bandwidth costs while improving user experience,” said Steve Daheb, chief marketing officer and senior vice president, Blue Coat Systems.
Blue Coat has extensive experience with service providers spanning more than ten years. Blue Coat solutions are deployed in all ten of the world’s ten largest service providers, as well as in many small and mid-sized ISPs and mobile operators.
The solutions enable the acceleration and security of traffic on the providers’ internal and production networks and provide a robust platform for managed security or WAN optimization service delivery.
With the introduction of the CacheFlow appliance, Blue Coat has reinvigorated its focus on solving service provider challenges for bandwidth savings, improved user experience and the delivery of rich Web 2.0 content.
By Telecomlead.com Team
editor@telecomlead.com
