NZ ISPs slow to cache international content, despite benefits

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 23 September 2009 12:52

IT Industry - Strategy

The New Zealand Commerce Commission has released its latest quarterly survey of broadband performance, showing significant improvements in http (web browsing) performance by the few ISPs that have invested in caching international content.

The Commerce Commissions report is based on testing undertaken for it by Epitiro, a UK company that specialises in ISP performance measurement. Epitiro has been measuring the NZ Internet every quarter since early 2008 .  Its assessment of Australia's broadband performance early this year highlighted significant shortcomings.

According to the Commission, "Despite the improvements in performance attributable to increased investment in caching undertaken in the previous quarter, there are still only three ISPs, Telecom, TelstraClear and Slingshot, that are using caching to improve the speed of accessing international content. Many ISPs are delaying or foregoing the implementation of caching for a variety of reasons, including security issues and capital constraints."

Caching stores international (and sometimes national) content locally enabling subsequent users of the same content to download it at local or national speeds. The impact of caching international content on performance can be significant. However, caching has little impact on national speeds.

The Commissions report compares the http performance of the three ISPs using international caching with their non-cached performance and shows improvements of at least 100 percent.

The Commission says it expected that more ISPs would install caching to improve the performance experienced by their customers, but "Enquiries suggest that this has not happened because of: capital constraints; and/or [the fact that] caching is complex and has to be handled carefully to address security issues so is still under consideration by some ISPs."