This paper proposes and evaluates a Network Aware Forward Caching approach for determining the optimal deployment strategy of forward caches to a network. A key advantage of this approach is that we can reduce the network costs associated with forward caching to maximize the benefit obtained from their deployment. We show in our simulation that a 37% increase to net benefits could be achieved over the standard method of full cache deployment to cache all POPs traffic. In addition, we show that this maximal point occurs when only 68% of the total traffic is cached. Another contribution of this paper is the analysis we use to motivate and evaluate this problem. We characterize the Internet traffic of 100K subscribers of a US residential broadband provider. We use both layer 4 and layer 7 analysis to investigate the traffic volumes of the flows as well as study the general characteristics of the applications used. We show that HTTP is a dominant protocol and account for 68% of the...