Global trends in network usage strongly suggest that ICPs (Internet Content Providers, like Google, Netflix and Facebook) are set to become the new ‘super power’ of the Internet.

Regular Internet users like you and I are voracious consumers of content. News, sport, entertainment and social media – we want to access it all, everywhere, anytime. It is this insatiable appetite for content that is driving the change; ICPs are building their own Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) because using ISPs alone to distribute content around the globe is – frankly – becoming too expensive. 1080p has replaced 480p as the standard resolution for streaming video content, and as at 2017 – 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every single minute!

Considering the sheer volume of content that is created and consumed in an average day, ISPs will have to be innovative, and adapt to being bypassed by ICPs in this way – or risk being left behind. ISPs will likely move closer to the end-consumer and become a ‘middle-man’ between consumer and content provider.

As ICPs invest in creating their own distribution networks, having a clear view of network performance becomes even more pertinent. The rise of CDNs has created an incentivized drive for advanced network monitoring, particularly with real-time feeds. Telemetry makes such advanced network monitoring possible – allowing for a detailed view of network performance in near real-time.

The Internet Technology industry is fast changing – it always has been. Experts predict that by the year 2020, every piece of fibre-optic Internet cable in existence will be lit and in use. That is how fast things are progressing. ICPs continue to dish out content – the fresher the better – and consumers continue to gobble it up. This is something that doesn’t look set to change though, at least not anytime soon.