Unfortunately, no two ISPs are equal, which often times, forces you to purchase from both. TCP implementations of OS's today have been tuned for the late 90s, which requires dives under the hood to tune them for today's TCP.
When your application performance is pegged on the network the, most people say just put static content on a CDN - and that works. But for dynamic content, most people think you're screwed. While you can't main any gigantic gains on it, there are a few things you can do for speed: TCP tuning, compression, path optimization, and pipelining.
Here's where you need to slow down and think for a moment before you re-invent TCP.
If you "retune" everything for broadband, you're crippling your ability to reach your emerging mobile audience, whose TCP metrics look for all the world like dial up and ISDN of the late 90s.
Your mileage may vary.
But even at that if you start talking 100k+ clients you can't offload them all at the same time so you end up having to create this custom origin/mid tier distribution system...
Very annoying. I'd like to see CDN's being held liable if they go down or drop you entirely.
If you're talking about the "unlimited traffic" or "price too good to be true" commodity delivery resellers, their business models are sometimes built on overselling and like a cell provider, those will throttle or drop you.
That said, a "network of networks" is a great strategy beyond a certain level of traffic. Nine Systems built a great business on that principle for video streaming until purchased by Akamai. Balancing video over multiple CDNs is a service we offer as well.
Finally, if your CDN SLA doesn't hold the CDN liable for going down, you're doing it wrong.
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