User expectations for website and app performance continue to rise. A recent study found that 70 percent of tablet users expect a web page to load within two seconds, and 46 percent of those users will switch to a competitor’s site if they feel their expectations are not being accommodated. Today, users expect comparable levels of performance on mobile devices, over mobile networks, a key metric given that mobile and tablets are the fastest-growing segments of the interactive user community.

Make sure your CDN is all that

On top of the crucial, but traditional, services they provide, here are five features you should demand from your CDN:

1. Front-End Optimization to quickly deliver small files that are part of almost every modern web page: CSS files, JavaScript and other scripting files, small graphics. Delivering these files quickly results in faster page loads, and happier customers.

2. Dynamic Site Acceleration to pre-fetch and utilize network tools to deliver data that typically is not cacheable, like personal account information, time-sensitive data, shopping cart contents. Your CDN should be helping you improve complex website and application performance.

3. Mobile Optimization to allow the fastest-growing segment of the Internet user population to find your site, your apps, and your content, while making sure it is delivered quickly and reliably over a variety of networks, and optimized for the devices being used, whether that’s a smartphone, a tablet, or any new, emerging devices making their way to the marketplace.

4. Enterprise Acceleration to ensure that the applications you run on servers behind the firewall, or in the cloud, are performing well for users outside those firewalls, virtually anywhere, on any IP-connected device. The performance of your enterprise applications for your employees, partners, vendors, and others is a key element in how they can contribute to your business, and your CDN should be helping to ensure that they are performing at the best possible levels.

5. IPv4 / IPv6 Dual Stacking, a topic I covered in a recent blog post, to give your IT team an important tool to manage the important transition to IPv6.

These are just a few key opportunities for your business to improve performance, save money, and drive new business and revenue through the smart use of your CDN.  How does your CDN measure up??

Here are a few important steps you should be taking to maximize the value of your investment in cloud infrastructure:

1. Use a CDN

Accelerate your cloud app delivery using the benefits of Content Delivery Network (CDN) services to distribute and cache your content and business logic. A modern CDN can anticipate the demand, pre-fetch data and content, and manage your network utilization so that your users and customers will enjoy the best possible experience when interacting with your business. If, for example, you are hosting a weather app in the cloud, the CDN will recognize that requests from south Florida tend to focus on local zip codes, and cache that data at node servers closer to those users, improving response times, and saving on network usage. With the right CDN, even e-commerce apps featuring personalization can dynamically manage resources to minimize the number of data and content calls traveling all the way to the cloud hosting site.

2. Plan for your mobile users

While a lot of CDNs can help deliver your cloud apps more effectively, it’s also important for you to plan for the growth in mobile Web and mobile app usage. For example, Gartner has published a strategic planning assumption projecting that by 2015, at least 60 percent of information workers will interact with their content applications via a mobile device¹. A CDN that streamlines your access path to your mobile users will add immediate value to your business, and improve the return on your cloud investments.

3. Consider mobile app acceleration

A quicker network path to your mobile customers is key. But it’s also important to optimize your apps and content, accelerating their performance. Mobile users expect apps to perform as quickly on a phone or tablet as they would on a desktop or notebook computer. In fact, 60 percent of surveyed mobile users say they expect a Web page to load in three seconds or less on their mobile device, and 50 percent are only willing to wait five seconds or less before abandoning the Web page entirely.  Mobile application and content acceleration are critical features of your CDN eco-system — and your complete cloud infrastructure.

The primary reason CIOs and CTOs are moving to the cloud is to reduce capital and operational costs. But saving money is no bargain if you alienate your customers in the process, because they will remember the good experiences, and they will remember the bad ones, too.  When you evaluate your SLAs, your hosting options, and your data security, don’t neglect the critical importance of optimizing performance and response times in your Web and mobile apps. When planned correctly, you can save money while boosting revenue at the same time. And that means you will find clear skies when you move to the cloud.

What are you doing to reduce costs and improve the customer experience in your move to the cloud? Are you using a CDN? If so, what has your experience been?

Let’s look at just a few ways this alliance will shape the industry and offer businesses superior tools to deliver faster content and improved application performance to users.

A Stronger Content Delivery Network

Businesses get more features, more reach, and more control, backed by AT&T service and support. Here’s how:

More Features. Whether businesses need essential CDN services to reduce network traffic and improve end user experiences, or more complex optimization and acceleration services, the new AT&T CDN delivers — mobile content optimization, dynamic site acceleration, cloud acceleration, broadcast and advertising services, and more.

More Reach. In the United States, more than 100 million mobile, broadband, public Wi-Fi, and U-Verse customers get faster network access. Our new CDN, powered by Akamai, can deliver content to these users faster and more reliably than ever before.

More Control. A Content Control Center offers crisp, granular control of CDN features and services. One site to manage content delivery details, rules, app acceleration, and content optimization. Business demands are supported through a secure, flexible application with customizable permissions.

By marrying the premier network service provider with the largest provider of content delivery services, this alliance opens a world of possibilities for content owners, and delivers content, apps, and cloud services faster for end users and customers.

What are your thoughts on the alliance? What advantages can you see for your business?

What does this mean for you and your business? Well, for one thing it means you need to make sure you’re delivering your content to these users as efficiently as possible. It means that now, more than ever, you need a Content Delivery Network (CDN) designed to facilitate distribution to mobile networks and devices. It also means a rich variety of content types are available for you to use in communicating with your customers – and the use of video in particular is on the rise.

Drivers for mobile content growth

Why should we expect mobile video and rich media to grow more quickly over the next few years? Let’s look at four catalysts:

• More content is available, from movies and TV shows to live streamed events and User-Generated Content (UGC)
• Video quality is improving, both via stronger compression algorithms and better UGC recording quality
• Better screen technology, including Retina displays and larger smartphones
• The rise of 4G/LTE networks, delivering speeds many times faster than more traditional 3G technologies

Gartner’s report, “Market Trends: Worldwide, the State of Mobile Video” estimates that mobile video users will grow rapidly, from 429 million in 2011 to 2.4 billion by 2016, with a CAGR of 41%*. While a majority of mobile video will be viewed via Wi-Fi, over 700 million of those users are projected to be using 3G/4G/LTE access. These faster network speeds means that users located in non-Wi-Fi locations will have access to video, and they will be watching.

Meeting user expectations

Mobile users won’t stay engaged if the user experience fails to meet expectations. They will stop watching video that is not high quality, or if a video stalls and starts buffering content multiple times. Users will have apps and games on their devices, competing for time and attention. So if you want your customers to watch your video content – from a product demonstration to an online ad – you need a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to makes sure your content is delivered as quickly as possible. And that means you need a CDN with fast connections to the major mobile networks, and direct access to viewers connected via Mobile, Broadband, and Wi-Fi.

Regardless of the solution you choose, the explosion in mobile video demands that you take the steps needed to provide your customers the best viewing experience possible, on smartphones, tablets, and any other device.

What steps are you taking to make sure that mobile users will want to stick around when they start engaging with your business via the Internet?

Content Delivery affects your customers, and your business

The concept of the CDN is well established: move content closer to end users, offer a better user experience, save on network time and cost, and provide replication that facilitates alternate routing. But a properly designed CDN, like the AT&T Content Delivery Network, can also offer ROI benefits to your business. As you gain an understanding of how your CDN actually accomplishes all of that, would you be better off using a carrier CDN, offered by a tier-1 network provider? In many cases, the answer is yes, and here’s why.

Quality matters, especially for video. Research by Intel, in a paper titled Understanding the Impact of Video Quality on User Engagement, indicates that delays in starting a video or buffering interruptions during playback can have a significant impact on how many users choose to view the video, and how long they continue to watch. Video content delivery is becoming even more important in the mobile space, with 100 million Smartphone users and 40 million tablet users who are able to consume video and rich media content virtually anywhere, anytime. As mobile video, photo, and music app usage grows at rates exceeding 200% per year, and with the phenomenal rise of mobile-only apps like Instagram and Socialcam, your choice of a CDN can have a real impact on your business and your relationship with your customers.

Visibility and accountability are critical. For a traditional, legacy CDN, the process of moving your content through the network relies on a number of parties: carriers, peering partners, local networks, mobile networks, etc. However, a carrier CDN has fewer moving parts and greater visibility into the status of your content every step of the way. Let’s compare two common scenarios:

In the first, a legacy CDN passes your content along to a series of network providers, and the CDN loses visibility along the way (see chart below). It is also important to note that each player in this process is working to optimize costs and margins, often not focusing on the optimal delivery of your content.

Now, let’s look at the same scenario using a carrier CDN. In this example, we’ll assume the end user viewing your content on a PC, tablet, or a mobile device is one of AT&T’s 18 million broadband users, or 100 million mobile customers, or is utilizing one of our thousands of wi-fi hotspots around the globe:

Even in a case where the carrier CDN passes traffic to another carrier for one leg of the trip, that happens under Tier-1 peering agreements, with greater assurance of optimal traffic handling and accountability every step of the way.

Most traditional CDNs were designed for the Internet of the 20^th century, with lots of small node servers that can require more data to be shipped more frequently. Newer CDN designs offer efficiencies in routing, storage, and caching, and can reduce the number of cache misses, particularly for your long tail content. These designs can facilitate content delivery by taking advantage of improvements to the Internet backbone over the last 15 years.

While CDNs offer a lot of benefits to speed delivery of your content to its intended audience, it is increasingly important to consider the full range of delivery criteria when choosing your CDN.  A complex infrastructure such as a CDN requires a whole range of experience and expertise from the provider, but also an efficient end-to-end supply chain that reduces the costs and headaches for you.

Do you have the CDN in place that is right for your content delivery needs?

The question now becomes, is your company ready for the IPv6 revolution, and if not, how can you prepare? Content delivery networks (CDNs) are a great solution because they can help reduce the performance impact for IPv6, in addition to supplying the support. Without a CDN, your company may run the risk of service disruptions due to IP address incompatibility or excess latency.

Today, most CDNs are “dual stacked,” where their servers make data available in both IPv4 and IPv6 formats. A CDN, like the AT&T Content Delivery Network can deliver content from IPv4 origin servers to IPv6 end-users and vice versa. It makes no difference whether or not the end user and the content provider are using the same IP address format. Simply put, IPv4 and IPv6 networks run in parallel in AT&T’s “dual-stacked” CDN backbone, allowing websites to serve end users without an IPv6 gateway performance penalty during the migration away from IPv4.

What to Know about IPv6 Compliance

• IPv6 Upgrades are a Major Undertaking.  Ensuring your company’s total IPv6 compliance entails software upgrades on all servers, firewalls, mobile platforms, internal networks, and customer-oriented, interactive websites. Included with this is the necessary training for your company’s IT support team. This involves long-term planning and budgeting.
  

  

• Your Customers are Your Lifeline. Interactive websites are essential to online commerce. It is imperative for companies that engage in online commerce to ensure that their websites are available to customers using both IPv4 and IPv6. Last November, eWeek reported that 25 percent of .com, .net, and .org domains are currently IPv6 compatible, and that that number can be expected to double by the end of 2012. Leading the pack in domain IPv6 implementation is the United States, demonstrating that domain IPv6 compatibility in the United States is a near-term reality, not a long-term goal.
• Get a Leg Up on Your Competition. In a recent InformationWeek survey, 38 percent of respondents had no plans to upgrade their systems to IPv6 in the foreseeable future. In addition, only 10 percent said their IT teams are IPv6-knowledgeable only 5 percent said that most of their systems are currently running IPv6. Using CDNs to make both internal-facing and external-facing communications IPv6 compatible offers a quick fix to IPv6 compatibility issues.

CDNs Offer Transition on the Path to upgrading to IPv6

CDNs ensure seamless continuity of service for interactive websites and offer flexibility in drafting financial roadmaps. In addition, using a CDN as a solution to the IPv6 transition can open up your business to the other benefits of CDNs, including reduced wait times and improved end-user experiences, meaning more closed sales and a more enjoyable online experience for users. The confluence of these factors in CDNs demonstrates their potential for assisting businesses in transitioning to IPv6.

What are you doing to prepare for the IPv6 revolution?

• Your business is not standing still—Your communications have to keep up. Gartner’s MarketScope for Video Content Management and Delivery survey shows that IT executives at large companies predict growth from 7.2 hours of video streamed per user, per month in 2010 to 10.8 hours in 2012. They project that by 2016, large companies will stream more than 16 hours of video, per worker, per month. When you want to convey important corporate communications, video can be more effective than static print or web content to today’s employees and customers. For an external audience, video can convey important, visual information about your products and services. It also allows your customers to promote your brand by offering feedback, or by linking to or sharing your content.

• Video is flexible—Multiple devices, many audiences. Whether you’re updating your sales staff on promotions or relaying corporate communications to a worldwide network of employees, video is flexible, and people carry more devices for playing video than ever before. Gone are the days when your communications were limited to the television in the break room or conference room; video technology allows you to relay important communications without worrying about synchronizing employee schedules or getting everyone in the same room. To be most effective, choose video management services that will make your videos available on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices, so every member of your target audience can watch, at their first opportunity.

• There’s Gold in the Data–Monitor and measure your success. Reporting, analytics, metrics, security; these are all important elements that allow you to know if your content is successful. First, make sure the content is accessible to the teams you want watching, but not to audiences who don’t need the information. Then, track viewings so you can understand how long people watched, identify teams that aren’t keeping current on their viewings, and encourage feedback – even allowing 1 to 5 stars to be assigned can tell you a lot about which videos are most effective and successful –and help improve all of your communications going forward.

Video unleashes new possibilities for business communications. With the right tools in place –including secure, flexible, multi-device video processing and delivery to all of your locations—you can deliver engaging video to virtually any device, with security and accountability built in.

Has your business used video? If so, what challenges did you face? How did you measure success?

But the scary statistic for web publishers is that, according to Compuware Inc., 58 percent of mobile phone users expect web sites to load almost as quickly as or faster on their mobile phone in comparison to their PC.  I can understand why users have that expectation, but I am sure you will agree that it is not often the same experience.  How many times have you experienced or witnessed others with the anxious stare as the mobile user waits for the requested web page to load.

Having visitors wait for a page to load is frustrating to marketers and will become increasingly so as mobile platforms become more critical.  Forrester predictsthat in the upcoming years, mobile commerce is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 39%.  Mobile platforms are well positioned to be critical drivers of growth for many business segments so what can you do to ensure you are minimizing mobile anxiety for your users and visitors.

First let’s put aside the most commonly blamed culprit for slow page load times – the mobile networks.  Mobile networks are being upgraded as fast as the carriers’ capital budgets allow and, as a web publisher, there’s not a great deal you can do to address this issue.  Slow page load times are not only about the bandwidth or the possibility of overloaded towers, rather a major cause which is almost never discussed for slow mobile page load times is the disparity in the round-trip-times (RTT) experienced by users on wireless versus wired broadband networks. The RTT from the mobile device to the mobile gateway and back is inevitably greater than the last mile RTT from the end user back and forth over cable, fiber or DSL broadband connections at home or at work.

One of the major causes of these slow RTTs on mobile devices is the dated nature of the HTTP request-response protocol.  The HTTP protocol is now decades old and many of its shortcomings are difficult to work around when delivering to mobile devices.  For example, HTTP allows processing of only one request per connection.This means that it takes a minimum of an RTT to complete a single request, and prevents the browser from using that connection to send additional requests until the response is fully received.

Browsers on a personal computer circumvent this issue by launching as many as 6 separate connections per hostname.  The problem of slow RTTs on mobile devices can also be compounded by variable and inconsistent connections.  A slow initial connection slows all the connections behind it.

One approach to address the HTTP problem is called “pipelining,” and in fact is part of HTTP/1.1. This enables the client to send additional requests on a connection before receiving the entire response back from the server. Pipelining enables better utilization of the link by eliminating some unneeded round trips. Unfortunately at the moment most browsers and some servers and network proxies do not support pipelining.

Pipelining is also unable to handle the sequencing of requests and responses which results in responses having to be sent in the exact order as the requests.  Therefore if there is a request for an object that is slow to serve it will slow the entire request.  One way to address this problem is to improve the intelligence of these requests thus reducing the likelihood of a request for a slow object creating a downward spiral of latency.  Intelligent image compression can be used to ensure image size is optimized for the requesting device and its’ display capabilities and the real-time conditions of the user’s mobile network.

Intelligent mobile optimization solutions such as these are currently being deployed by the AT&T Digital Media Solutions team to improve the quality of mobile delivery and reduce those RTTs. At the same time we are moving content and delivery logic closer to the user via more intelligent caching.  Along with improved mobile networks we are confident that the level of anxiety caused by the mobile wait times will decline.  This will be in line with the tremendous growth in business results that mobile platforms will increasingly deliver.  Please visit our website for more details on our AT&T Content Acceleration service and specifically our Mobile Optimization products.

What do you think of think of Google’s initiatives around SPDY?  Do you think it will be broadly embraced by handset manufacturers?

Increasingly this connectivity is via devices such as smart phones, game consoles and tablets.  Marketers are increasing innovative at driving e-commerce sales.  Flash crowds are being driven to e-commerce outlets by flash-sales and daily deals.  Leaders in this arena include Groupon,  LivingSocial and Yellow Pages’ Deal of the Day.

As businesses become more dependent on e-commerce revenue and as that revenue is increasingly generated on connected mobile devices, attention is turning to helping deliver a  browsing and purchase experience that is on par with the one delivered on a PC.  Consumers expect performance to be equitable.

Research conducted by Harris Interactive and commissioned by Tealeaf Technologies show that 85% of consumers expect the experience on mobile devices to be better than or equal to online using a laptop or desktop computer.  The time is right to be focusing on optimizing the mobile experience.

Recently AT&T Digital Media Solutions launched a host of services designed to optimize the performance of websites and applications on mobile devices.  These services will be featured at the upcoming eTail East in Boston from August 8-11.

At the event, we will be exhibiting and presenting at a luncheon with the theme “The challenges of delivering an optimized experience on ecommerce platforms – from WANs to Mobile Networks”

Topics to be addressed include:

• Aligning online customer experience with brand and business performance
• Delivering a personalized online experience
• Overcoming the challenges of mobile handset type proliferation
• Ensuring mobile connectivity is transparent to network performance

What has your experience been with shopping on your mobile device?  What has been good?  What has been terrible?  Post your comments here and share the experience with others.

This explosive growth has also created a new dynamic in the marketplace, consumers are looking to consume Internet video on their televisions and have the video be at the same quality or better than they are used to getting from their traditional pay TV operator. Managing for the  exponential growth of IP video traffic is the most significant challenge faced by IP Network operators.

Currently many of the large distributors of Internet video use third party Content Delivery Networks (CDN’s) to manage this delivery for them.  Simply put, CDNs manage a network of servers that cache the content in geographically disperse locations. This enables the content to be located in more than one location and served from a point that is likely to be electronically closer than if it was only located on the distributors origin.  This helps  speed the time of delivery to the end user which can result in a better quality experience. This provides the ability to scale to meet the requests of large crowds, and the ability to redirect to an alternate source in case of network issues.

The CDN model is an improvement over each content owner managing their own network of servers.  This is because it allows massive economies of scale for smaller and medium sized content owners. As the demand for high quality video displayed on internet connected devices grows the legacy model of over the top CDN’s will increasingly break down because they don’t own the network all the way through to the consumer so are reliant on multiple third party relationships and chains of relationships that can easily break causing a disruption in a content owners ability to provide the quality of experience that the consumers demand.   In addition to issues with QoS over the medium term, the legacy CDN model  results in inefficiencies for the network operator, the content owner/distributor and the content viewer.

For the network operator, CDN traffic travels in an unpredictable fashion and often takes an indirect path across its network resulting in additional expense and quality degradation.  The challenge for content owners is that they have to rely on multiple third parties who can not give quality of service guarantees as they have little control over the ultimate delivery.  Network conditions and consumers are increasingly being asked to bear the cost of delivery, with bandwidth caps coming into play, and they are forced to put up with an unpredictable quality of service.

There is a better way.  Operator-based CDNs are a solution. With CDN infrastructure embedded within carrier networks,  network traffic can be more efficiently managed by selecting better network paths and having more control over traffic flows within the network.  With this cloud-based model, content owners have a direct path to the consumer with a consistently higher quality of service over the long term.

Simplifying the supply chain may result in a significant reduction in the number of variables that can impact QoS- Quality of Service. Some of these include  “over-the- top” CDN providers, transit carriers, and others whose interests in the short run may not be aligned with the content owners or consumers.  Consumers benefit from better quality video and in the long run will benefit from a more stable economic balance in the distribution chain.