Apple in Talks with Leading U.S. ISPs for Building its Own CDN

Apple is currently negotiating paid interconnection deals with some of the largest ISPs in the U.S. for building its own CDN, according to StreamingMediaBlog. CDN or content delivery network, serves content to end-users with better availability and faster performance, which is why Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Ebay and other content owners have already built out their own CDNs.

(Left) Single server distribution(Right) CDN scheme of distribution (source)

For mast many months, Apple is said to have been building out its own CDN to deliver software updates, apps and other related content. As part of its build out, it is currently negotiating paid interconnection deals with some of the leading ISPs in the U.S. It is believed that Apple is seeing paid interconnect deals as simply part of the costs associated with building out its own CDN network. “Apple does push a lot of traffic at times and the more devices they sell, the larger their traffic grows”, notes the source.

“I’m not going to disclose which ISPs they are talking to and what deals they have already done, but it’s interesting to note that with all the talk lately of net neutrality, peering and interconnect relationships, Apple isn’t out in the market making any complaints. While Netflix has used the media, consumers and lawmakers to try and argue that CDNs should get as much peering as they want, at no charge, Apple doesn’t seem to agree with that sentiment. If they do, they certainly aren’t complaining in any public forum.”

Despite all the talk in the media about how bad paid interconnect deals are, this is how the Internet has been able to grow over the last few decades and how services got to the scale and performance that they are today.