ATIS's Cloud Services Forum's new Content Delivery Network Interconnection (CDN-I) Use Case Specification and High Level Requirements (ATIS-0200003) standards is designed to make the user and the service provider's provisioning of content simpler.
Based on work that it began in February, the new CDN-I standard provides what ATIS says is an initial description of content distribution networks (CDNs) and develops interconnection use cases and requirements to initiate content distribution requests between service providers.
Andrew White, an industry veteran who had previous stints at the former Qwest Communications, now CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL), who serves as the Chair of ATIS' Cloud Services Forum in an interview with FierceTelecom, said that the short timeframe was necessary so they could solve a real business problem service providers were facing in delivering content to their consumer customers.
"In my experience with ATIS and with other standard development activities, the fact that anything got done in 90 days is a huge leap forward in terms of trying to deliver functional requirements and specifications to market," he said.
While service providers have well-established agreements to exchange traffic, the ATIS standard is a step at simplifying that process with a set of common interfaces between providers' operations systems, back office interfaces, routing equipment, and network interconnections. All of these elements are designed to make the user experience more efficient for the service provider.
Up until now, whenever a user requests a piece of content, that piece of content could, for example, go across AT&T's (NYSE: T) last mile and core networks and then onto Verizon's (NYSE: VZ) network and then Level 3's (Nasdaq: LVLT) CDN. By moving the content request to the end user, ATIS says there are fewer network resources that need to be involved in that delivery.
White said that the CDN-I standard takes away much of that complexity.
"The goal is to allow a signaling mechanism that allows Level 3 to signal back to AT&T's content delivery node and say, 'you have a user on your network requesting a piece of content, and if you don't have it here it is and the terms of that delivery,'" White said. "That's really the goal--separate the application level from the delivery component of the content."
For more:
- see the release
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