NetEqualizer News Blog

I was just going through our blog archives and noticed that many of the caching articles we promoted circa 2011 are still getting hits.  Many of the hits are coming from less developed countries where bandwidth is relatively expensive when compared to the western world.  I hope that businesses and ISPs hoping for a miracle using caching will find this article, as it applies to all third-party caching engines, not just the one we used to offer as an add-on to the NetEqualizer.

So why do I make such a bold statement about third-party caching becoming obsolete?

#1) There have been some recent changes in the way Google provides YouTube content, which makes caching it almost impossible.  All of their YouTube videos are generated dynamically and broken up into segments, to allow differential custom advertising.  (I yearn for the days without the ads!)

#2) Almost all pages and files on the Internet are marked “Do not Cache” in the HTML headers. Some of them will cache effectively, but you must assume the designer plans on making dynamic, on the fly, changes to their content.  Caching an obsolete page and delivering it to an end user could actually result in serious issues, and perhaps even a lawsuit, if you cause some form of economic harm by ignoring the “do not cache” directive.

#3) Streaming content as well as most HTML content is now encrypted, and since we are not the NSA, we do not have a back door to decrypt and deliver from our caching engines.

As you may have noticed I have been careful to point out that caching is obsolete on third-party caching engines, not all caching engines, so what gives?

Some of the larger content providers, such as Netflix, will work with larger ISPs to provide large caching servers for their proprietary and encrypted content. This is a win-win for both Netflix and the Last Mile ISP.  There are some restrictions on who Netflix will support with this technology.  The point is that it is Netflix providing the caching engine, for their content only, with their proprietary software, and a third-party engine cannot offer this service.  There may be other content providers providing a similar technology.  However, for now, you can stick a fork in any generic third-party caching server.