Is CDN Capacity Meeting Current Demand?
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Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Tim Siglin: We're gearing up for a bunch of live events and suddenly those live events are being pushed to 2021, but there seemed to be--because of working from home, because of some things, even like Zoom--an uptick of capacity use. Are we risking running out of capacity, or are we just testing the models to see how they do?
Neil Glazebrook: Yes. It's very interesting. We'd actually planned very aggressive expansion build-outs for the first half of 2020. That was planned last year. So no changes to that. I will say that some of the expansion plans are in two dimensions. There's increased capacity, and then we're always looking for new locations and new peering relationships. Certainly we have tried to bring those as far forward in 2020. What we have seen is some regional hotspots and we found, in certain regions--India is a great example--literally as we deploy additional capacity, those servers are just packed right there, just fall. We wouldn't normally expect that. We'd see a more gentle ramp. We want to get capacity in. The the consumption patterns follow that.
One area is just is almost like "build it, they will come." Maybe it's not irrational, but we do have content providers come to us and say, "Well, how much capacity can you give us? We'll take it all. What sort of guarantees can you give us?" There were a few customers that have asked those sorts of questions in the past, but we're seeing it from customers that we wouldn't normally expect it from--those that are more regional and smaller in nature.
Jim Hall: In terms of planning, because we are the new kid on the block, we are always growing. But also we've been planning for this same events that Peter mentioned. We've built out our network pretty substantially in the last 18 months already. So it didn't catch us out. There's been a trade-off as well because while we see an uptick in certain customers, we also see a substantial down in others. We do a lot of streaming, and so, overall, it went steeply up and to the right.
But in terms of capacity, we were fine. We saw some really substantial increases from certain countries: Italy doubled, the United Kingdom was over 75% increase. So it fell in our pipes very nicely, but it didn't hurt us in any way. I do want to say, though that there were still some very busy people ensuring that things were routed correctly to ensure that we were leveraging all the right peering and transit relationships so that was as seamless as it was for the people that needed it.
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