CACHEBOX brings livestream to life

ApplianSys is pleased to announce that the sixth-largest municipality in Norway purchased a CACHEBOX earlier this year and have now confirmed success, fully eliminating problems caused by livestream video, without upgrading their internet connection.

At its peak, their network now delivers 233GB of livestreamed content while using just 13GB of actual internet capacity.

Kristiansand Kommune relied on Vimeo to share live announcements and training content with up to 1,000 employees and students. But when so many users simultaneously accessed the same content from their local government offices, the existing 1GB high-speed bandwidth connection was not able to cope with the spike in demand.

Livestream video requires roughly 3Mbps of connectivity per user – so about 300 staff members watching at the same time would use all internet capacity. As a result, video announcements would regularly overwhelm the network, slowing the internet connection for all office users and even shutting down essential email and internet browsing.

Congestion-free streaming for over 500 users

Local partners, Netsecurity, consulted ApplianSys and chose to install a CACHEBOX310 in Kristiansand’s local network.

Live video is notoriously difficult to cache – but CACHEBOX’s intelligent video cache extensions made it possible to efficiently save and serve requests for streaming content. Only the first users watched the Vimeo livestream directly from the internet; all other requests made from the local network were served directly from CACHEBOX, at LAN speeds.

Thanks to CACHEBOX, Kristiansand were able to run their first congestion-free livestream with over 500 users. Partners Netsecurity reported:

“When users joined a livestream, there were no buffering issues. Because only one internet request was being made, everyone could watch in higher quality and without any delay. Users who joined during the stream could skip forward without buffering. And with potential congestion offloaded from the network, routine internet and browsing were not affected.”

The results were striking. CACHEBOX met 94.4% of demand for the Vimeo livestream content from local cache. Only 13GB out of a total of 233GB came from the internet. The livestream caching report showed that CACHEBOX had provided an extra 691Mbps of additional virtual capacity, serving demand peaks of 817Mbps while using just 150Mbps of actual internet capacity for Vimeo. This effectively extends internet capacity by almost 5 and a half times, without a bandwidth upgrade.

“Intelligent caching technology is a game-changer for any network that sees spikes in traffic for repeat content,” says Roger Clark, CACHEBOX Product Manager. “The municipality’s technical team are confident that CACHEBOX will deliver the immediate bandwidth savings they need now, and be ready to cache far more types of traffic whenever demand changes.”

About NetSecurity AS

Netsecurity AS (org. 993 856 886) is a Norwegian company established in 2009, owned by Agder Energi Venture and employees. They provide services and solutions that enable businesses and organisations to work safely online.

About Kristiansand Kommune

Kristiansand municipality is one of the biggest in Norway with 110,000 inhabitants. It employs 9,000 staff, making it the largest employer in the Agder district.