ISP feeds hungry customers with web caching

New Zealand ISP CallPlus has implemented a web caching solution to help manage a 50% growth in customer hunger for internet content from outside New Zealand.

The ISP’s consumer and 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% of its traffic is for international content.

The company 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.

The ISP selected Blue Coat’s CacheFlow 5000 appliances to address these requirements.

The appliances can cache web content to reduce bandwidth consumption and to boost the quality of an internet experience.

Following the deployment, customers of the ISP’s consumer brand, Slingshot, can experience faster downloads and web page loading and smoother, more quickly delivered video.

Initial trials of the web caching appliances, conducted by CallPlus over a three-month period, showed a reduction in its bandwidth consumption of more than 40%. At the same time, the speed of content delivery and quality of video experience also increased, due to the use of caching.

“Once we deployed the caching technology, we were serving web traffic considerably faster than our main competitors,” says Adrian Dick, Chief Technology Officer, CallPlus. “[The solution] both reduced costs and improved customer experience; it was the only solution to meet our payback hurdle.”