Akamai, ignore Wall Street. Then continue to build out your network, by investing tens of millions of dollars in buying capacity, colo, servers, switches, routers and infrastructure, every quarter, because you will definitely need it in 2 years. Wall Street is all about pennies per share – in the grand scheme of things, the difference of five pennies in earning expectation is minuscule to the things that are coming upon us in 2017.
Next, fire Apple. It’s getting tiring hearing about Apple this, Apple that. Apple is letting Apple get to their head – if they want use an internal CDN for everything, then kick them in that direction. There’s a lot of business out there for everyone. Take the one time $100M or $200M hit in annual revenue, or whatever Apple is spending with you, and go on. Learn from Limelight on how they dealt with the Netflix departure. No company in the world should be held hostage by their biggest customer, unless your Lockheed Martin dealing with the DoD. Firing Apple is good business practice.
And ignore the Cisco VNI report because using historical global IP traffic patterns to predict future global traffic patterns is meaningless, when three major disruptions in the last mile are looking right into your face. If you haven’t heard, individual connections to the home and mobile device are going to be in the multi-Gbps territory in 2-3 years. Thus, last mile bandwidth consumption will shoot to the stars.
Next-Gen GPON is here and now, and some implementations being done across the world are staggering – some downstream speeds start 2Gbps and go up to 10Gbps in places like Singapore, Japan, Armenia, and so on. And that’s only taking into account the 1st generation product. Also, next generation DOCISIS is upon us, and Arris is testing last mile bandwidth speeds of 200Gbps over existing facilities. Sure it won’t be a while, but if they can achieve 10% of that sooner rather than later – game changer.
Lets not forget 5G, which will start being deployed in 2017 by none other than Verizon. Some preliminary downstream test rates from different vendors have been in the range of 1.2Gbs to 7.5Gbps range. The truth is that in the next 2-3 years, mankind will enter a new space age era of virtual reality, space exploration, high speed transit, and so on. Don’t be surprised if bandwidth consumption increases 50x to 100x fold in 2-3 years, which would more than cover the lost of Apple’s business.