30% of Net traffic bypass backbone!
It was a shocking news that I thought heard it wrong. I was looking for the next sentence that, somehow, puts everything into perspectives that was in line with my belief. But, the world I was living in was suddenly changed to a new world where seven large giants supply 30% of the internet traffic, directly from their data centers, to end users.
This is huge! The traditional thinking of the internet design is being chipped away at the edge, by these giant data centers that own their own super highways. It was Akamai that started to distribute customer data at the edge level. But, I believe, they were still using the backbone to carry their replication data. The idea was to service from a local ISP, rather than over the long distance. But, when companies like Google and YouTube started to peer with major ISPs, the game changed. Using their own fat pipes they purchased after the bust of 2000, Google and Company was able to light up those pipes for internal routing.
Of course, peering relationship means they must take in as much traffic as they send. But, once a packet has entered Google’s pipe, it is no longer an ISP playing ground. They claim that they are not an ISP, in traditional sense. This can only be true if Google treats those pipes exactly like internal connections. If they do route public traffic, they no longer can claim non-ISP, even though they do not charge for the traffic.
So, the question is, does Google and other six giants carry public data? If not, what offsets their outgoing traffic in their peering relationships?
I know they all do podcast download services and other services to ramp up the traffic in the other direction, but they add up to a blip in their radar screen. Compared to, for example, the amount of YouTube traffic for the countries that Google has no data distribution points, Google must take in the traffic from other ISPs. What are these traffics and that do they do with them? I have yet to find answers for my questions. I am sure there is a perfectly good and logical answer to this, and others.