A few days ago Google announced “a new experimental protocol for a faster web” called “SPDY” (pronounced SPeeDY) this would seem to, at first glance,  put Google head to head with the major CDN providers out there like Akamai and Limelight.

So what’s the problem that these companies are trying to solve? The protocol that “runs” the Internet is called TCP/IP and its over 30 years old.  TCP/IP was designed for reliability and resilience to perform over low speed telephone lines and make sure that your data got to its destination. Today’s Internet is a far cry from the original design criteria. Modern web applications are bigger and have far more request response traffic and are ‘chatty” in comparison to web pages from 10 years ago.  Google points out in its white paper many of these problems.

TCP/IP Optimization products are not a new idea; many companies have made a great living on making your web pages load faster.  Riverbed and Fastsoft offer specialized appliances to assist in the acceleration of the delivery of content to your end users as well as the CDN services such as Akamai and Limelight.

What’s interesting in this announcement is Google appears to be going it alone and proposing a new project called SPDY to be built into its web browser Chrome that would make web pages load 50% faster. Google certainly is big enough to attempt this on its own without going through and waiting for standards boards.

So is this a threat to the CDN players today? In the short term no, Akamai has a strong business and a diversified portfolio of products however in the long term if browser based optimization becomes the standard, the question needs to be asked if there will there be a continued need for separate Application Delivery Networks or devices?

Update:  Google has also announced that page load times will be a factor in web page rankings ……..

Some results from Google’s testing of SPDY.