The companies' partnership upgrades live streaming, VoD and other delivery types to million of Latin American consumers, maintaining a top QoE and delivering locally amid rising demand.
Cirion Technologies and Qwilt have formed a new partnership that will expand Qwilt's global ecosystem of service providers, and lead to a more efficient, scalable content delivery network in Latin America. The two companies are collaborating to result in higher quality live streaming, video-on-demand (VoD) and other forms of media delivery for over 600 million consumers across all of Latin America.
Cirion, previously the Latin American operations of Lumen Technologies, officially launched in 2022 as an independent company with an extensive fibre infrastructure, subsea cable network and data centres in economic centres across Central and South America. In recent years, however, Luman has sold off some of its CDN service contracts, like those in Latin America. Cirion and Lumen plan to maintain a strategic partnership covering reciprocal reselling and network agreements using each other’s fibre footprints and other network assets.
New Demands
The rapid growth of mobile users, IoT devices and cloud applications globally places new demands on service provider networks. By combining with Qwilt's all-edge global delivery network, Cirion will have more control over the quality of the content that reaches their subscribers, improving digital experiences across the region while enabling content and application publishers worldwide to deliver locally to their viewers, wherever they may be. Qwilt's systems, deeply embedded within network infrastructure, opens the opportunity to service providers to optimize and efficiently scale their networks while continuing to deliver great digital experiences.
"As data consumption and Internet traffic increase across Latin America, and content providers need efficient delivery services as they compete for Internet bandwidth. With this agreement, Cirion and Qwilt's combined CDN services are better able to meet these new demands on their CDN customers," said Alejandro Girardotti, Senior Director of Products, Innovation and Strategic Alliances at Cirion Technologies.
This new partnership, based on Qwilt's Open Caching streaming architecture, allows Cirion to quickly scale up as market demand increases. It increases Cirion's ability to reliably deliver high-quality live and VoD streaming throughout the region and become one of the largest low-latency CDN service providers across Latin America.
Collaborative Delivery
Open caching addresses the bottlenecks in internet infrastructure caused by the increased consumption of streaming media and other online content. It relies on collaboration between service providers, content publishers and technology developers to deliver a better experience to consumers.
The architecture involves placing caches deep within service provider networks, which cable, telco and mobile network operators then use to cache and deliver streaming media from locations close to consumers. Qwilt's implementation of open caching links these service provider partners through open APIs, forming a global CDN. As each new service provider joins the linked CDN, advantages for content publishers increase, allowing them to reach more viewers with higher quality.
As more publishers come on board, the viewing experience becomes more attractive to consumers, increasing the demand for streaming - and so on. Also, because the content is delivered from close proximity to the subscriber, it retains its original fidelity, without disruptions, lengthy download times or control response delays.
This virtuous cycle makes the value of the network more accessible, establishing the technical and commercial building blocks - PoPs, caching servers and storage drives and RAM for hosting video titles - to scale the internet into the future.
Open caching minimizes the number of times content is delivered from content provider sites, reducing the total volume of data crossing the transit links. For instance, frequently viewed content can be stored and delivered to subscribers from close by, within the local network. As overall volume decreases, network conditions improve. Open caching can also reduce the investment needed to support the greater demand for bandwidth - setting up open caching prepares networks for content delivery without substantial CAPEX expenditures.
Optimal QoE
Cirion's content delivery network supports reliable content delivery to users around Latin America. Many media and ecommerce sites, for instance, aiming to extend their reach and grow their businesses, use its programmable edge and customer services. Its architecture contains over 200 edge servers in 24 regional PoPs, with delivery capacity above 13Tbps, and is interconnected to global CDN partners and tiered to reduce load and cost of edge server caching.
Cirion's strategy includes server placement within an IP backbone at key peering points between networks, and deep edge caching within ISPs. It enhances cache efficiency through edge clustering, popularity-based caching and request collapsing. As a Tier 1 provider, it can control direct network-to-network peering (or exchange) to help ISPs correct routing issues, and allow rate limiting when ISPs need to better manage large software downloads.
As a major digital infrastructure and systems provider, Cirion now operates over 50,000km of terrestrial long-haul and metropolitan fiber optic cabling, 36,000km of submarine cables and 18 landing stations, allowing it to operate with scalable networks that can adapt to the increase in connected users without impacting their QoE.
"Our infrastructure adapts dynamically and in real-time to market demands, enabling an efficient management of critical applications and their data. This makes it possible for companies to identify market trends in advance and respond quickly, with solutions that stimulate future growth," said Alejandro Girardotti. www.qwilt.com
