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The demand for faster internet and content delivery increases every day, and Midco has long been committed to staying ahead of the curve. To improve the overall experience for our business customers – SMBs, enterprises, and wholesalers alike – Midco has been working extensively on caching partnerships with all major content providers. 

These partnerships are aimed at bringing content closer to consumers, thus reducing latency and jitter and improving the customer experience. In this post, we explain our overall caching strategy – including edge caching – and examine how it continues to benefit our business customers now and in the long term. 

Our Long-term Strategy for Keeping You Satisfied  

For many years now, Midco has been at the forefront of bringing the internet closer to our end customers. Recognizing early on that the demand for online content by residential and business users would cause an astronomical increase in network bandwidths, we adopted a long-term strategy of identifying alternate ways to bring the internet to you. For example: 

• We have consistently been ahead of our competition in bringing fiber cable into more and more cities, neighborhoods and business communities across our service area.  
• Our points-of-presence in several key Midwest locations ensure lightning-fast service across our entire footprint and set us up for continued expansion.  
• Caching partnerships with major content providers bring you closer to the content you’re consuming, which reduces latency and jitter.  

In previous blogposts, we’ve explored our fiber strategy and the true value of our points-of-presence.  Let’s now explore caching in more detail.  

Caching: What It Is and Why It Matters 

Caching means storing copies of requested content closer to the end user to reduce latency and improve the user experience.  

Let’s consider an example. “Company Z” is a cloud-based service provider located, like so many content and service providers, in California. Company Z’s clients are enterprise businesses with hundreds or even thousands of employees spread across the country – some working in central offices and many working remotely. These enterprise clients are demanding because the success of their businesses depends on reliable high-speed connectivity – for videoconferencing, accessing central file repositories as well as collaboration tools and applications. And all that content must travel from Silicon Valley, for example, to users in Mississippi, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, and all points between. Of course, all that travel brings the potential for slowdowns, latency and jitter.  

But what if Company Z could initiate those journeys not from Silicon Valley, but rather from Dallas, New York City, Minneapolis, Chicago and Seattle, respectively? Those are much shorter routes. Let’s take it a step further: What if it could initiate the content delivery from many, many data headend locations throughout the country? Now we’re talking. More specifically, now we’re talking caches. 

Company Z knows that jitter, latency and slow speeds hurt their reputation, often sending its customers to Company Y instead. Similarly, the network provider carrying those streaming services – Midco – knows the same. If we don’t bring this content to each business and its employees seamlessly, no one is happy. Midco doesn’t want that and neither does Company Z, so we partner to move the most business-critical content to servers (or caches) closer to the end users.  

OK, so what is edge caching? 

It’s easy to think of this partnership as being focused on big cities, but that’s not the case. The idea of edge caching is that we are working with content and cloud-based service providers to bring their services closer to wherever it is that users are demanding it.  

Midco has caches in Minneapolis, for example, but let’s say we notice that Detroit Lakes, MN, a longtime popular family vacation spot and now also a fast-growing business community, has a measurable volume of users all year long. So, while Detroit Lakes might be on the edge of our service area, if our users are demanding it, why wouldn’t we bring caches closer to Detroit Lakes? It benefits our customers, naturally, and in turn benefits Midco’s reputation and the reputation of providers who traffic our fiber. We meet, agree, shake hands, and just like that bring content to our servers in Detroit Lakes. 

In other words, edge caching is the strategy of always pushing the limits, the boundaries, and most importantly, the reach of our footprint. You want better service where you are? We’ll push our caches to the very edges to bring you the best service possible. It’s what we do and why we’re in this business.   

Midco’s Caching Impact 

We currently have caching systems in Bismarck, Cambridge, Fargo, Lawrence, St. Joseph, Rapid City and Sioux Falls – and that’s in addition to our points-of-presence (where caches are also located) in Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis and Omaha. In other words, if you’re in our footprint, you’re already enjoying the best possible experience because we’d be hard-pressed to get a whole lot closer to you – although we’ll never stop trying. And as we mentioned, our long-term strategy is to keep pushing both the envelope (figuratively) and our cache footprint (literally).  

Midco's caching partnership work is essential in bringing service, content and access closer to our consumers, improving your experience, and reducing network loads. Caching partnerships with major cloud service providers have allowed for faster content delivery, reduced network latency and saved resources.  

For our business customers, this technology means reduced file transfer time and quicker access to cloud services. Our ongoing (and escalating) investment in edge caching technology and partnerships is proof that we will continue to be a leader in network technology and customer experience.