British Telecom (BT) has announced a “transformative” new back-end network technology called Multicast Assisted Unicast Delivery (MAUD). However, the cost savings appear miniscule, and amid a questionable rebranding to EE, the former state-owned incumbent is vulnerable. BT says that MAUD will allow content providers to treat it as a virtual CDN. BT will use its internal network caches as a host for third-party content, and then optimally point end-users to the nearest cache – delivering consumer streams as unicast, but caching everything in the first place via multicast. As such, there should be much less traffic entering BT’s network from these content providers, which should give BT much more control over its access network – for both fixed and mobile.…