Today was the first time the company has officially confirmed it has been working with a major Tier 1 US carrier, rumoured to be AT&T, for the past 12 months, and it has now reached General Acceptance with the carrier for the design, development and deployment of its CDN platform. The announcement comes three months after EdgeCast announced its licensing agreement with Asian carrier Pacnet.
EdgeCast has gone on to claim the Tier 1 US carrier reshaped its CDN strategy around EdgeCast’s technology platform – saving it over $100 million in costs. The carrier’s formal General Acceptance of EdgeCast’s CDN comes after an initial 12 month adoption, and EdgeCast has since transferred full control of its CDN software to be deployed on the carrier’s infrastructure. This includes control of content delivery for caching, streaming, load balancing, network and server management, reporting, customer and account provisioning and technical support.
“Handing a major carrier the keys to its own independent CDN is a major step for our carrier market strategy,” said James Segil, president and co-founder at EdgeCast Networks. “We’re uniquely positioned to help carriers build a scalable, battle-tested CDN because we first built our own – one that’s now trusted by more 4000 of the world’s busiest sites.” He continued: “This deal, alongside our direct CDN business, will give millions of consumers turbo-charged access to high demand content. This milestone is the proof that we’re not just talking about helping carriers – we’re actually doing it.
Segil discussed the merits of an open access wholesale CDN in Capacity’s big interview in December 2011, and he has today reinstated this belief, which is expected to be the next phase of deployment of EdgeCast’s CDN platform by its carrier customers. The company believes the next step for a managed carrier CDN is the federation of traffic across multiple CDNs to enable the offer of content delivery into markets where CDN carriers have no network infrastructure.
“Since EdgeCast is both a CDN operator and a software provider, we can allow carriers to resell our network, we can manage their CDNs for them, or license them the software so they can run their own independent CDNs,” added Segil.
The company outlined three ways in which its 10 carrier customers are presently working with the company, before the launch of its open wholesale CDN platform. These include: reselling CDN services through white label offerings - a strategy adopted by Deutsche Telekom and Telus; building a managed CDN on the carrier network; and licensing Edgecast CDN software and services on its own networks (strategy adopted by the Tier 1 US carrier and Pacnet).
