Tuesday, December 11, 2018

App, Content Providers Have Invested $300 Billion in Internet Infrastructure Last 4 Years

In the four years since 2014, app and content providers have invested over US$300 billion in internet infrastructure. This amounts to US$75 billion per year, which is more than double the 2011– 13 average annual investment of US$33 billion, says Analysys Mason.  

Some 90 percent of that investment has been for hyperscale data centers and third-party data center colocation.

The balance of investment includes including terrestrial transport networks and international submarine cables and edge content caching.

The goal of the growing investment in infrastructure is to move content and services ever closer to end users, which helps to optimise service quality while controlling costs, Analysys Mason says.

There is a good reason why all wide area and local access network have become computing networks: most computing now occurs at cloud data centers, which requires communications with edge devices.  


In substantial part, content and app performance also drives demand for edge caching. Also, since most cross-network traffic now is video, including entertainment video, edge caching reduces the amount of traffic that has to be carried over the wide area networks.

Over time, enterprises (content and app providers) also are building their own private content delivery networks, instead of buying service from third parties.


App and content providers do, however, buy a substantial amount of hosting space from third parties. Amazon, for example,  holds more leased square footage than it owns, Analysys Mason says.

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