While quizzing Qwilt on the recently announced Open Caching deployment with Vodafone, we found that the company is already exploring ways to combine its traffic-squeezing infrastructure with multicast ABR devices. Speaking to Faultline at IBC 2023, Mark Fisher, VP Marketing and Biz Dev, told us that Qwilt is currently engaged in conversations with customers around multicast ABR, and claims the technology is complementary, not competitive, to Open Caching. “Open caching collapses traffic in the core of the network, after which point, unicast streams go to each home. There are still redundancies left, but they are less critical – capacity is less of an issue,” he told us. However, the classic criticisms of multicast ABR, primarily its reliance on CPE, still…