At Your Service
Partnering with a content provider like Akamai is another option. To date, the company has deployed more than 4,250 content and caching servers spread over 225 different networks throughout the world.
Akamai provides guaranteed content bandwidth. For example, a contract to provide 1 megabyte of data per second costs about US$1,995 per month. The Web site must rewrite its Web page to use Akamai URLs that will distribute graphics, streaming multimedia or text through the Akamai network. Generally, the home page, common graphics and some streaming multimedia content is delivered via the Akamai service.
Akamai also provides extra bandwidth to handle extreme traffic peaks. That service allowed 500,000 users to grab the McAfee antiviral solution to the ILoveYou virus on the day the fix was published.
Akamai has an interesting proposition for ISPs: They can receive a caching server at no charge. The partnership gives the ISP's customers faster access to the content of Akamai customers like CNN, Tower Records and Yahoo.
Your Content, Please
Internet congestion and disruptions will keep content delivery in style. Whether it's the hardware, the consulting or the service, partners can find funds in pushing content to the edge of the Web. They just have to make sure it doesn't go over the edge.
