The number of urban residents is growing by leaps and bounds in India, putting the spotlight on building smart cities. Recently, the government earmarked 100 smarter city initiatives to be implemented in 20 cities in an initial phase next year. Part of the mission is to provide core infrastructure and give a decent quality of life to its citizens, a clean and sustainable environment and application of ‘smart solutions’. In this idea of a connected world, people can move through life more easily with greater ease and convenience. Better connections mean people can receive the information they need, right when they need it. However, one of the key internet connectivity problems is wide variations in connection speeds depending on location, coupled with sporadic surges. The current infrastructure simply doesn’t provide good connectivity reliably and to all regions.

Here’s where Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) can come into play and support the smarter city movement. CDNs act as distributed servers that deliver content such as web pages and video to people via service provider last mile connections. The robust backbones that some CDNs are built on can move massive amounts of content around the country rapidly.This method minimizes latency, or slow response times, and TCP connection optimization eases the traffic load on a customer’s own network. The closer the CDN edge servers are to a user, the faster the content will be delivered. CDNs also provide protection against large traffic surges, such as when people watch a live streaming event.

With a CDN, the journey for content is speeded up. The Limelight CDN, for instance, by passes the internet, using our private fiber backbone, turning it into a more direct journey. Why a private network? Because a CDN that relies on the public internet is at the mercy of content complexity and network congestion. A private network, on the other hand, can offer global scale that bypasses the public internet, massive capacity to handle high surges in traffic, and greater optimization flexibility. It works this way: content is cached on edge servers located closer to where the user is located. So when a user goes to a website, for example, the edge server closest to him or her is the one that delivers the content. This allows the data to travel the shortest distance possible, reducing latency and delays. If content that is requested is not yet in local cache, integrated origin storage in the CDN, or another close by cache, can deliver it rapidly.Studies from Limelight and others show that just a 5 second delay in the start of a video turns off most users, for example, so fast content delivery is critical.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) act as distributed servers that deliver content such as web pages and video to people via service provider last mile connections

The delivery of audio and video content over-the-top (OTT) is a perfect ‘smart’ application for a CDN. A unique aspect of the Indian OTT market is the large population base living outside India. There are more than 250 million expats in more than 120 countries today. These OTT customers are often mobile viewers and consuming content from a variety of places -- waiting in line at the store, during a long flight, or on family vacations. In delivering content for businesses around the world, Limelight has learned that OTT viewers watch from a variety of devices -- Smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes, and gaming consoles. Delivering content to multiple devices is now expected. However, bringing an OTT offering to the market isn’t simple or inexpensive. Instead of investing in infrastructure, a business can use a CDN. A global CDN like Limelight’s offers a single platform to handle all operations, working across many regions for a reasonable price.

In summary, the Smart cities mission intends to promote adoption of smart solutions for efficient use of available assets, resources and infrastructure. A CDN can help make the critical infrastructure components and services of the city – which includes city administration, education, healthcare, public safety, real estate, transportation and utilities – more intelligent, interconnected and efficient. And just as importantly, enhance a city’s livability, workability and sustainability.