Intermedia Communications subsidiary Digex, a first-tier, national Internet
carrier, announced the deployment of transparent Web
caching using Inktomi’s Traffic Server caching solution.
Digex said it is the first
national carrier in the United States to use caching technology to improve the
performance of the World Wide Web.
“Today, the need to provide customers with exceptional response times has
never been more
critical,” said Ed Kern, VP, Network Services Group at Digex. “Through our
partnership with Inktomi, we can realize this goal for our customers,
giving them an even greater level of online performance and
reliability.”
Large-scale Web caching has been successfully deployed in the UK, using an
alternative brand of cache, by Demon Internet Services. Digex’s approach is
similar, using a multi-user-shared cache to feed frequently-accessed pages to
users who connect to it. Intermedia/Digex ensures customer confidentiality by
not maintaining logs of requests for cached sites, while also erasing the
destination logs each day.
The Digex service currently uses Traffic Server 1.0, although the ISP is also
beta-testing Inktomi’s next release of its carrier-class network cache
software.