How does your CDN strategy impact the Quality of Experience?
You cannot improve what you cannot measure. Learn about our first comparative look at the Content Delivery Network (CDN) performance metrics and how major CDN providers perform in Spain. Also download our first Cloud Performance Benchmark to know who is the fastest CDN provider.
A CDN is a network of Points of Presence (PoPs) or servers to make content distribution reliable and effective. There are many CDNs in the market, such as Akamai, Fastly, Amazon CloudFront, Google Cloud and Cloudflare.
As an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or over-the-top (OTT) provider, you would like to understand what a collaboration with these providers means for you and for your customers and, in more general terms, what the benefits are of caching, interconnection, routing and peering agreements. Telecommunication operators and other entities usually want to go beyond the typical list of Points of Presence (PoPs), services and pricing, and understand how cloud performance relates to end user experience.
As a CDN provider, you would like to understand how the optimizations you are making to the networks and new products and solutions improve performance and stability for your clients and end users.
ISPs and CDN providers alike want to understand how they benchmark against competitors to discover what is average and what is the best-in-class network performance.
It can be very difficult for CDN providers, ISPs, telecommunication operators and other entities to anticipate cloud performance and understand its impact on daily operations and services. Organizations want to improve the experience for end customers but cannot improve what they cannot measure.
Quality of Experience (QoE) benchmarking and network monitoring applied to CDN services help organizations to understand how key metrics and actions improve network performance and end customers’ QoE based on the presence of the CDN. Our solutions offer organizations the ability to:
- CDN Performance Benchmarking across CDN providers and ISPs. Performance statistics help identify competitive gaps, performance patterns and potential areas for optimization.
- Monitor and optimize CDN performance and other QoE-related indicators from customer premises. Diagnose and better manage service incidents, quickly detect performance issues and lower the mean time to resolution (MTTR), in addition to having full visibility on pre- and post-optimization improvement actions.
- Control SLAs with CDN vendors. Independent validation and measurement can be used to ensure that CDN vendors are offering a good service.
To offer these capabilities, MedUX is launching its new CDN performance test that measures, monitors and benchmarks the performance of several CDNs directly from customer premises, revealing the TRUE customer experience.
The test initially measures throughput and latency to CDNs by fetching an object over TCP/IP. Current default test configuration, during the first trials with European telecommunication operators, is set up to fetch a 10 MB file.
According to our trial measurements, Akamai is the fastest CDN provider in Spain, followed closely by Fastly in both throughput and latency. Amazon Cloudfront, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure lag clearly behind in throughput, and Amazon Cloudfront and Cloudflare lag in latency.
Figure 1: CDN performance by Speed
MedUX provides objective and independent CDN performance benchmarking and monitoring metrics to gather competitive intelligence information and to help our clients understand what to expect when adopting cloud services. Our QoE benchmarking covers not only the average performance of each CDN provider but also a more granular view of the performance depending on location, the telecommunications operator and the speed profiles and technology of the end customer.
Read our full publication and download MedUX CDN performance insights:
- The “what” and “why” of CDNs
- What our CDN performance test measures
- How CDN providers perform in Spain
Stay tuned to our next reports and insights and get in touch with us at hello@medux.com if you need further information.