Software updates are a problem for many service providers: networks come to a stop when a major update is released.
Software vendors constantly upgrade operating systems, anti-virus and other software packages. Users need to update their versions regularly to improve performance, usability and security.
These update files can be enormous: a major software update can consume significant bandwidth and slow down access across your network as each device individually downloads the files. The simultaneous download of these heavy objects by large groups of users affects the networks of many ISPs.
Software updates cannot normally be cached: traditional caches are only effective when a whole file is requested but updates often require only part of a file. So, these caches will serve the partial file but will not cache it.
When intelligent caches serve partial files, they also download them. This way future requests can be served from cache – problem solved.