Dan Rayburn:
Since last year, Apple’s been hard at work building out their own CDN and now those efforts are paying off. Recently, Apple’s CDN has gone live in the U.S. and Europe and the company is now delivering some of their own content, directly to consumers. In addition, Apple has interconnect deals in place with multiple ISPs, including Comcast and others, and has paid to get direct access to their networks.
Early tests show Apple is using this $100 million CDN to distribute OS X upgrades to customers as directly as possible.
This investment is another example of Apple liking to control the whole stack, but the company isn’t an ISP. Paying for direct access (not unlike Netflix) puts Apple in better standing with companies like Comcast, but the net neutrality implications are a little icky.
That said, with Comcast, Time Warner and others having the ability to slow down any one body of traffic and hold it hostage isn’t Apple or Netflix’s fault they have to play the interconnect game. It’s the federal government’s.