traffic in these instances if an alternative path is available. Akamai developed its own proprietary protocol, FastTCP (Transmission Control Protocol) as a replacement for the 40-year-old TCP, which introduces delays in transmissions. TCP was designed for resiliency, not for today's densely trafficked networks where delays are unacceptable. Delays in TCP are caused by its continual acknowledgments of received packets and negative acknowledgments of dropped packets. Acknowledgments in TCP are known as acks and notice of packets dropped are known as negative acknowledgments, nacks. FastTCP streamlines these processes to prevent delays. FastTCP algorithms are deployed in Akamai edge servers. According to Eric Buda, Senior Director of Global Platform Operations at Akamai, When streaming, people will start to abandon a website if it takes more than 2 seconds for a video to start. Then www.TechnicalPDF.com every second after that you lose 6 percent of your audience. 80 percent of people abandon a website if their wait for the screen to start to fill is longer than 30 to 40 seconds. Akamai also provides a security service for customers. The security software screens packet headers for malware. It doesn't look at the actual payload (user data) in packets. To ensure privacy, payload content is encrypted. When Akamai's security software sees evidence of malware, such as overly long packets or hundreds of percentages of more than the usual amount of traffic, it sends the traffic to Akamai's scrubbing center, which removes the malware and sends the legitimate traffic to the network. Other content delivery networks in addition to Akamai are Level 3 (part of CenturyLink] and Limelight. Some carriers also operate content delivery networks. TRANSPORTING MOVIES AND TV IN THE CORE Both telephone service providers and cable TV companies have infrastructure in their core networks to receive and transmit entertainment content to customers. They each do this from centralized headends. Using Headends to Receive and Transmit Programming