The Internet during a pandemic: Maintaining the quality of service

General

As the COVID-19 continues to spread globally at alarming rates, governments and large companies alike are taking great preventative measures to slow the spread of the disease, such as by cancelling large events, limiting travel, and forcing employees to work from home. These initiatives are moving a large influx of people into the digital realm at a rapid rate, which is stressing out networks and causing the quality of service to reduce. With so many people now relying on the internet for their livelihood during this pandemic, it is important for service providers to have control over traffic volumes in order to maintain their quality of service. For that, they need excellent network visibility and analytics.

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It is important for analytics to be backed by powerful data

General, Products

It’s that time of year again. Another great year is over, and it is time to start making plans for an even better year to come. As we begin to map out our goals for the next 366 days, we thought it might be fun to look further into the future at the potential solutions and services BENOCS could offer its user… when the time is right.

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How the BENOCS Director went from research to product

General, Products, Research

Back in 2010, before BENOCS, our founder along with a few other researchers presented the new challenges facing ISPs: CDNs/hyper-giants and their poorly mapped traffic. In that proposal[1], they opened the research community to a new idea: the prospect of creating a system that would be implemented in the ISP network, which would use the network’s data to facilitate better mapping from the CDN/hypergiants’ side. Now, nine years later and six years of development, the system called the BENOCS Director is not only running, but has also proven its viability and is showing positive results.

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What are self-operated Meta CDNs, and should ISPs be concerned?

General, Research

Before 2014, Apple – one of the largest content generators on the web today – relied on external content delivery networks (CDNs), such as Akamai and Level 3, to deliver everything from music/video streaming to iOS updates.  In 2014, Apple released their CDN as an effort to take control over the quality of their content delivery as well as creating the final puzzle piece that gives them control over the entire customer experience (hardware, online platforms, ect.). Interestingly enough, as Dan Rayburn predicted, Apple was in no hurry to convert all of their traffic to their own CDN and would still need some time before they completely stopped offloading traffic onto third-party CDNs.

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Why geolocation is important for enforcing the General Data Protection Regulation and other privacy policies

General, Research

If you are living in Europe or doing business with European companies, you are probably already familiar with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which has been in effect since May 2018. However, what you may not know is how this law is actually administered. After all, a law is only as good as its ability to be enforced. Given that internet content is shared globally, how can anyone ensure those within the European Union (EU) borders are actually protected by this law, especially when content needs to travel across borders? How do we know if data is just passing through, or if it is terminating in Europe? What can be used as evidence of violations? The answer: geolocation and tracking flows.

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Episode 5: Vision Gaps: How to overcome them by evolving towards ISP-CDN interplay

General, Products

In the previous episodes, we mentioned that the internet demand is continuously growing, and the network infrastructure is no longer able to efficiently support the heavy traffic without costly upgrades and extensions. So far, we discussed the tools currently being used to support content delivery, why we think they are no longer efficient, and the solutions we can provide to help the network operate better. However, what we have not yet answered is why. Why has the network evolved this way if it is inefficient? To answer that, let us have look at some of the internet’s history to determine the aspects that made it this way, what challenges it faces from the outcome, and how Benocs fits into this timeline. Continue reading

Episode 4: Vision Gaps: How BENOCS tackles the delivery of different types of content

General, Products

In the previous episodes, we explored the different approaches currently implemented into the network in order to keep up with the increasing customer demands and the delivery of content across the internet. Although they are currently capable of sustaining the higher demands and expectations, their systems are not efficient and require frequent and costly infrastructure updates to manage future congestion. At BENOCS, we introduce a new way of managing internet traffic by collecting and sharing information that is already available on the network in order to balance the system and to facilitate the best and fastest delivery speeds for all types of content such as transaction/clicks and video streaming. Each of these particular types of content have special needs in terms of delivery, in which BENOCS’s unique system can optimize all of their performances. In order to understand the significance, let us now return to our pizza scenario to see what types of issues the stores could face, and how delivery services could be improved with real-time traffic reports for the best performance and customer satisfaction. Continue reading