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Edgix, Edge Services Provider
Edgix claims that it serves ISPs before publishers, and that in doing so, it has created a new category of company, the Edge Service Provider.
Associate Editor, ISP-Planet
[October 20, 2000]
There are energy companies that generate no energy — they make money by helping utilities conserve energy. Edgix is helping ISPs conserve telco bandwidth by sending content through satellites to cache machines located at the Point of Presence (POP) of client ISPs.
Edgix claims that the difference between its caching network and the networks of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) such as Akamai is that Edgix is paid for by the ISPs while other CDNs are paid for by content publishers.
Edgix calls itself an Edge Service Provider (ESP) to highlight the difference, highlighting the fact that some other CDNs only accelerate the content they are paid to push.
The vision
Rangu Salgame, president and CEO of Edgix, explained the company vision
to us. He pointed out that the ISP revenue model is a flat fee, but that
customers' bandwidth usage is rising. Thus ISPs are experiencing rising
costs and flat revenues.
He added that DSL only doubles subscription fees, but multiplies bandwidth use and time spent online.
He concluded, "ISPs are the coal miners of the Internet. ISPs' subscribers are very valuable assets that are difficult to exploit."
The nuts and bolts
Edgix installs its solution on a cache machine at the ISP's POP. Edgix
provides the software for no up-front fee, but does not provide a free
cache machine.
The software monitors traffic, and sends an analysis of all requests to Edgix's master operations center in New York City.
The most popular content is sent to the cache directly through a satellite link (Edgix did not build its own satellite network). The satellite link bypasses any congestion points.
The value
Edgix claims its SLA will ensure that its network must perform as claimed.
The SLA is simple: If we do not serve X% of your traffic off of our cache,
then you get one month of Edgix service for free.
If Edgix can lower an ISP's per-subscriber bandwidth usage, then the ISP can either pay for less ILEC bandwidth, or put more subscribers on the bandwidth it is already paying for, thus solving the problem posed by Rangu Salgame, that revenues are flat while bandwidth usage is rising.
Sample deployment
I spoke to Joseph Varello, Vice President of Corporate Development for
the ISP Everest Broadband.
Everest calls itself a Building Local Exchange Carrier (BLEC).
Everest uses Edgix to speed provision to cluttered urban areas, mostly tier-1 cities. Joseph Varello explained that there are times when, "you cannot just add pipes to solve problems," because if the problem is an Internet bottleneck, then no last-mile solution will help.
He also pointed out that in some setups, everyone pays the price for a single bandwidth hog. If the high-bandwidth content is coming off of a service in a tall building, and running through the ISP's own fiber directly to the user, then everyone benefits from a less-cluttered upstream pipe.
—End
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