A Unified Delivery Network

In response to rapid growth in over-the-top (OTT) services like gaming and high-quality movies, we partnered with Ericsson in 2014 to create a Unified Delivery Network (UDN), which was launched at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2016. The network was designed to transform content distribution by creating a partnership-based ecosystem for content and service providers, solving for increased network demands that strain resources, slow performance and interrupt delivery. The UDN connects content providers with service providers in the “last-mile stretch” of content delivery, where service providers can use the UDN to see how their network is configured, gauge how it’s performing to ensure it’s delivering the appropriate content and also adjust its configurations.

The UDN enables content providers to deliver high-quality content including high-definition video and virtual reality (VR) experiences better than retail content delivery networks (CDNs).This gives content providers a higher quality experience at significantly lower delivery costs. Content providers can also see how their content is being consumed while setting rules that determine how their content is delivered—like setting perimeters for copyright or time-sensitive content within different regions. With Cisco estimating OTT traffic will grow 55% each year through 2021, the UDN has the capability of transforming network performance as we know it.