Advanced Content Delivery, Streaming, and Cloud Services

Chapter 18Content Delivery in China: A ChinaCache Perspective

Michael Talyansky¹, Alexei Tumarkin¹, Hunter Xu², and Ken Zhang²

¹ChinaCache, Sunnyvale, CA, USA

²ChinaCache, Beijing, China

18.1 Introduction

Content delivery industry has a long history in China. ChinaCache began providing content and application delivery services in 2000, and it was the first company (that is not a telecommunications carrier) to obtain a nationwide operating permit from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China to provide content and application delivery services. Chinese Internet landscape is dominated by China Telecom in the South, and by China Unicom formerly known as China Netcom, that “owns” the North. They interconnect in a handful of places, which often experience congestion due to an excessive demand. High transit prices (on the order of $100–$200 per Mbps) are a byproduct of this joint monopoly.

As a carrier-neutral service provider, ChinaCache's network in China is interconnected with all telecommunications carriers, major noncarriers, and local Internet service providers in China. It is deployed across networks throughout China, and it uses a private transmission backbone that connects nodes and data centers, thereby optimizing the content and applications delivery performance and reliability (Figure 18.1).

Figure 18.1 ChinaCache data centers and private backbone ...