An effective approach for content delivery in an evolving intranet environment - A case study of the largest telecom company in Taiwan

Abstract

Being the dominant telecommunication company in Taiwan, ChungHwa Telecom Co., Ltd., CHT is her symbol listed on the New York Stock Exchange, provides major communication services to more than 23 million people living in Taiwan. CHT has vast number of software developed on client-server or web-based architectures with client software installed in more than ten thousand client computers spreading over the entire nation. Since telecommunication industry evolved in fast pace, the software functions are constantly changing. The changes have to be reflected in all client software before new services can be launched. Thus, the cost and time in distributing contents to client computers has become a major concern in CHT. To improve the efficiency of contents distribution, this research helps CHT develop new software to automatically distribute contents to client computers. To minimize the chance of system locks and balance contents distribution loading, in the new system, each dispatching server sends update contents to no more than three other servers. The contents are delivered with hybrid routing strategy that combines both fixed and adaptive routing strategies. With its low error rate and speedy distribution, the new system reduces the man-minutes per year required to manage the contents distribution of a client server system from 14,227.2 minutes to 1,144 minutes, namely reduces 92% of the time. The user satisfaction of the system was also found to be above 80% among six factors of the measurement designed by Bailey, et al. [1]. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005 intranet systems, system integration, routing algorithms.