On the economic impact of Telco CDNs and their alliance on the CDN market

Abstract

The CDN (Content Delivery Network) market consists of content providers (CPs), Internet service providers (ISPs), and CDN providers and evolves based on their complex cooperation and competition. Recently, the rapid growth of content-oriented traffic has brought forth a new entity called Telco CDNs in the content delivery supply chain, where Telco CDNs are the ISP-operated CDN providers, vertically integrating content delivery service with traffic engineering, so as to provide better reliability and QoS to users and reduce infrastructure investments. Telco CDNs and traditional CDNs would compete for their market shares with their unique advantages: Telco CDNs are capable of jointly optimizing network costs and user-perceived QoS, but possibly with their geographical limitation in service areas, whereas traditional CDNs operate a network of servers worldwide, with the advantages of performing global, sophisticated analytics or providing better security solutions. Telco CDNs may form an alliance (e.g., cache server sharing) to compete with traditional CDNs, but with some alliance cost. With this CDN market evolution, this paper conducts a game-theoretic study of when and how traditional CDNs survive in the competition with Telco CDNs. In particular, our study answers the questions about the impact of Telco CDNs' unique characteristics on the long-term competition against traditional CDNs, and the impact of Telco CDNs' alliance. Our analysis provides useful implications on the economics of the future CDN market, e.g., what factors can be Achilles' heel and thus what features should be more focused for Telco and traditional CDNs.