Intermedia Communications subsidiary Digex, a first-tier, national Internet carrier, announced the deployment of transparent Web caching using Inktomi's Traffic Server caching solution.

Digex said it is the first national carrier in the United States to use caching technology to improve the performance of the World Wide Web.

"Today, the need to provide customers with exceptional response times has never been more critical," said Ed Kern, VP, Network Services Group at Digex. "Through our partnership with Inktomi, we can realize this goal for our customers, giving them an even greater level of online performance and reliability."

Large-scale Web caching has been successfully deployed in the UK, using an alternative brand of cache, by Demon Internet Services. Digex's approach is similar, using a multi-user-shared cache to feed frequently-accessed pages to users who connect to it. Intermedia/Digex ensures customer confidentiality by not maintaining logs of requests for cached sites, while also erasing the destination logs each day.