Content delivery nets aim to sync up

SAN DIEGO - Members of the content delivery network community this week will assemble at the 49th Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in San Diego to find a better way to work together - an effort that could benefit vendors and their customers.

Participants in a birds-of-a-feather discussion will try to establish a formal IETF working group focused on advancing standards that will enable competing content delivery networks to exchange traffic and ensure that equipment and software used to support such networks are interoperable.

Integration among content delivery networks could be a boon for companies using those networks to distribute their content. Like telephone companies and ISPs involved in peering arrangements, content delivery network partners could work behind the scenes to swap traffic and settle billing issues. By working together, they could expand their reach relatively inexpensively and enable customers to deliver content in a more timely fashion by staging it closer to information consumers.

It's unclear yet who will contribute to the discussion, or what the impact of such a working group would be on two existing content delivery network forums: Content Bridge (which includes AOL and Inktomi); and Content Alliance (which includes Cisco and Cable & Wireless). Members from both groups are expected to participate in the IETF meeting, and Mark Day, chief scientist at Cisco, will chair the meeting.

Glenn Kaino, a vice president at music entertainment company Farmclub.com, would like to see content delivery networks work together more closely.

"Networks are trying to compete with each other, but for us, the content provider, it would help to have some standard mechanisms where quality is ensured," he says. "We do a lot of trial and error with different vendors."

Content Distribution Internetworking Birds-of-a-Feather group: www.ietf.org/ietf/00dec/cdnp-agenda.txt; Content Bridge: www.contentbridge.org; Content Alliance: www.contentalliance.org