Qwilt and Cisco announced they will deploy their content delivery network for Vodafone, increasing the quality and capacity of Vodafone’s streaming delivery to its mobile and fixed broadband customers across Africa. Vodafone will embed the solution at the edge of its networks, closer to customers, so that they can receive highly responsive and quality streaming services.
The deployment uses a joint solution from Qwilt and Cisco, integrating Qwilt’s Open Edge Cloud for Content Delivery platform with Cisco’s edge compute and networking infrastructure. The solution gives Vodafone a telecommunication cloud platform for future CDN edge use cases.
This model will allow Vodafone to expand the solution and business opportunities to other content and application owners, and they in turn gain higher quality access to the millions of customers using Vodafone’s fast and reliable networks.
Following a successful trial in Italy, Vodafone will initially start deploying the service in seven countries across Europe and Africa. The roll-out of services will progressively ramp up as Qwilt and Cisco work with additional service providers worldwide in a move to create the world’s largest federated CDN. This will be supported by a global, consistent edge cloud footprint that benefits content publishers, service providers and customers.
The solution, comprised of Qwilt’s Open Edge platform and Cisco’s Edge technology, provides Quality-as-a-Service content delivery by pushing content caching and delivery far out to the embedded edge of the network. Content publishers can get started quickly and use the joint solution to deliver content closer to users, significantly improving the viewing quality.
By harnessing the power of Open Caching, Vodafone is using its capabilities and position as a significant network operator to take an active role in effective content delivery, and to expand opportunities to monetise this value chain while enabling the next generation of content experiences across its markets.
Over 150 service providers have partnered with Qwilt to enable the open edge in their networks, serving over one billion unique subscribers globally. They include Vodafone in Africa.
Giorgio Migliarina, Products and Services Director, Vodafone Business, said: “Our partnership with Qwilt and Cisco enables Vodafone and its broadcast partners to deliver a superior streaming service to customers. It means less buffering and lower latency services for the end user.”
“Also, by using open caching, we can more easily scale the service to meet the growing demands for live streaming, video-on-demand, and application services whilst providing content providers with a standardised platform built on Open APIs across multiple countries in Africa.”
Qwilt’s mission is to deliver connected experiences at the quality they were imagined. Qwilt’s open architecture and inclusive business model make local edge delivery more accessible than ever before, unlocking more reliable, higher quality-of-experience at greater scale than previously possible.
Qwilt is a vendor of the Open Caching movement and a founding member of the Streaming Video Technology Alliance. Qwilt is backed by Accel Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Ventures, Disruptive, Innovation Endeavors, Marker, and Redpoint Ventures.
