Our Approach to COVID-19

CenturyLink Content Delivery Network (CDN) meets customer needs during elevated traffic levels

March 31, 2020

With much of the world’s population staying at home, CenturyLink is seeing sustained CDN traffic increases from its customers across our global footprint. We are taking active measures to ensure optimal experiences during this period of sustained elevated traffic levels.

Planning alongside our customers and partners

CenturyLink engages in regular planning exercises with its customers, peers and internal stakeholders to ensure optimal CDN performance levels. During periods of sustained elevated traffic, the CenturyLink network planning guidelines serve as a natural capacity buffer, and proactive planning measures are taken with all key stakeholders so that we can keep our critical infrastructure performing as expected.

We work with our customers

To help them understand how to best deliver high traffic events
To help them adopt and execute appropriate multi-CDN strategies
To plan and reserve use of our network capacity to support the launch of new products
To activate CDN traffic reduction to meet regulatory guidelines

We plan capacity augments

For the network, using the insights derived from our customer-facing planning activities
With our network peers to ensure the optimal interconnection performance

Technology efforts to optimize customer experience

CenturyLink offers multiple software-defined traffic controllers to improve user experience and reduce network consumption.

CDN session rate control limits maximum user throughput while preserving end-user experience
- Control of throughput by geography, property and/or client
- Consulting and testing support to ensure performance
CDN Mesh Delivery improves user-experience for video with a peer-assisted delivery model (game download version anticipated to be available as early as 2021).
- Control by geography, property and/or client
- Consulting, implementation and testing support to ensure performance
CDN Intelligent Traffic Manager is a global DNS product that enables multi-CDN load-balancing and allocations.
IP traffic engineering to reduce congestion in specific locations on the global backbone

Protecting our Workforce

CenturyLink operates a global, geographically-distributed workforce that is enabled, in large part, to work remotely. In addition, we have put procedures in place so that personnel can report to a facility in the event of connectivity issues. CenturyLink’s Employee and Customer Safety policy is available for more information.

We have confidence in the resilience of our people, our communities and our technology, and will strive to adapt to our customers’ evolving needs during this extraordinary time.