The advantages of faster connectivity are rarely questioned these days, with consumers told it will improve their access to lifestyle and content services and enterprise users focused on improved productivity. Often the touted benefits are, to a degree, abstract. But in the world of high-frequency financial trading (HFT), the benefits are very measurable and very significant.

High-frequency traders use super-fast computers to trade automatically hundreds of times a second, often arbitraging tiny price differences between stocks listed on different venues. Added up over the course of time, the combined value of all those tiny profitable trades quickly builds into vast mountains of cash.

Revenue generated from the sale of content delivery network (CDN) services will grow threefold in the five years to 2017 to reach $4.63bn, on the back of a fivefold rise in global CDN traffic, according to the latest research from Informa Telecoms & Media.

Commercial CDN services are provided by a variety of companies, including “pure play” CDNs (of which Akamai remains the largest), telecoms network operators such as BT, AT&T and Telefonica, and relative newcomers to the CDN market such as Amazon and Google. Google already uses its own international CDN to distribute its YouTube video service. In addition, Google recently ventured into the market for commercial CDN services, in providing support for NBC’s online coverage of the London 2012 Olympics.

The days of the old-style triple or quad-play bundles are numbered. Going forward, operators will have to offer a whole range of new content and applications within their bundled products – including OTT content from companies like Netflix and Spotify and even VoIP from providers like Skype – to keep their subscribers happy.

A report from Informa T&M, Beyond Quad-Play: How Multi-Screen, OTT and the Cloud Are Transforming Next-Generation Bundling, takes a global snapshot of the fast-changing bundling market and shows how operators across the global market are offering new services and applications to bring more value to their bundled products.

The European Commission has released details of a cloud computing strategy that it claims will create 2.5 million jobs and boost EU GDP to the tune of €160bn annually by 2020. The Commission’s plan for “Unleashing the potential for cloud computing in Europe” is intended to speed the uptake of cloud services in the region, according to Neelie Kroes, EU vice president for the digital agenda.

“Cloud computing is a game-changer for our economy,” said Kroes in a statement. “Without EU action, we will stay stuck in national fortresses and miss out on billions in economic gains. We must achieve critical mass and a single set of rules across Europe. We must tackle the perceived risks of cloud computing head-on.”

The Commission believes that the absence of common standards and contracts is dissuading enterprises from embracing cloud services, with fears around the safety of internal and customer data paramount. A proposed European Strategy for Cyber Security is to be put forward “in the coming months”, the Commission said.

The Commission said that key actions of the cloud strategy include:

“Cutting through the jungle of technical standards so that cloud users get interoperability, data portability and reversibility; necessary standards should be identified by 2013;

Support for EU-wide certification schemes for trustworthy cloud providers;

Development of model ‘safe and fair’ contract terms for cloud computing contracts including Service Level Agreements;

A European Cloud Partnership with Member States and industry to harness the public sector’s buying power (20 per cent of all IT spending) to shape the European cloud market, boost the chances for European cloud providers to grow to achieve a competitive scale, and deliver cheaper and better eGovernment.”

Tony Werner, executive vice president & chief technology officer of Comcast Cable in the US, talks about how Comcast is using innovation to keep the cable company at the forefront of the broadband market.

ISPs don’t come much bigger than Comcast. As the largest cable provider in the US, the company is also one of the largest broadband service providers in the world. As such, the decisions it makes in terms of technology and strategy will inevitably have an impact in other parts of the world.

Backbone operator and cloud services provider Interoute has teamed up with IT services firm Unisys to develop a ‘more disciplined’ approach to cloud computing. The partnership focuses on a combination of Interoute’s IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and virtual data centre offering with Unisys’ management suite.