Broadband providers like MSOs, telcos, mobile carriers, and ISPs feel increasingly squeezed today. On one side, providers face continuous costly infrastructure investment, driven by relentless content traffic growth. On the other side are revenue threats from third-party over-the-top (OTT) services who compete with in-house offerings and profit from the very same traffic that’s driving up costs. Understanding and managing these dynamics are huge challenges that providers must meet to ensure the next phase of their success.
To help with that, Kentik offers a network detective solution of sorts, appropriately named Kentik True Origin™. This solution doesn’t wear a trench coat but does quickly solve any mystery, regarding the who, why, and what is impacting your network…and mostly, how.
Kentik True Origin — coupled with Kentik’s network observability platform and integrated proactive autonomous synthetics tool — delivers unparalleled holistic, proactive insights into the usual suspects taking advantage of your network: namely, sneaky CDNs and OTTs.
By leveraging real-time telemetry from network equipment that’s already in place, operators can get key insights about cost, performance, and subscriber behavior. Unlike siloed monitoring solutions with impeded visibility, Kentik True Origin integrates with our network observability platform and autonomous testing solution. This connection transcends past outdated approaches like DPI, monitoring appliances, and data lakes to deliver a deep, detailed picture of traffic associated with CDNs, OTT services, and subscribers.
CDNs deliver traffic from an ever-changing mix of infrastructure: their ASNs, caches in other networks, and caches co-located inside your network. With Kentik True Origin, you can automatically discover cached IPs for each CDN without any need for additional data. The CDN detection engine currently maps 50+ CDNs, including commercial CDNs and content provider-owned CDNs. The True Origin engine learns from your network configuration and a variety of public external sources to constantly learn and map CDN IPs in the background.
On its own, network data doesn’t reveal the OTT details business owners really need: service names, provider names, and traffic types (video, audio, application, etc.). True Origin helps merge traffic details with DNS data and Kentik’s in-house map of providers and services to label traffic with OTT context in real time.