More news from AT&T's big analyst event this week: the carrier reportedly is readying a strategic push into the content delivery network market, with plans to deploy more content caching and streaming gear in its network next year. Some CDN market observers believe traditional CDN vendors like Akamai, Limelight Networks, CacheLogic and Pando Networks, are looking more vulnerable these days as carriers look to get more involved in content optimization to protect their own bandwidth promises and service quality interests amid healthy growth in peer-to-peer and overall content traffic.
Level 3 already has made a big push into CDN through its acquisition of Savvis CDN and other moves, and AT&T undoubtedly could make a bigger splash, especially if it decides to acquire one of those traditional vendors in addition to its own CDN server deployments. Ironically, players like Akamai took over the CDN business nearly a decade ago when telcos and other carriers of Internet traffic weren't doing enough to optimize content delivery at the network edge.
For more:
- see this story [1] in Light Reading
Related articles:
- Here's more [2] about Level 3's CDN strategy
Links:
[1] http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=141221
[2] http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/level-3-content-plan-comes-clear/2007-10-05