Light Reading Mobile – Telecom News, Analysis, Events, and Research
News Analysis  

EdgeCast Eyes CDN Federation

January 09, 2012 | Craig Matsumoto |

EdgeCast Networks Inc. announced Monday that it's licensing its content delivery network (CDN) software to carriers, creating the potential for federated CDNs.

EdgeCast runs its own CDN, which carriers can resell to their customers. But for more than two years Edgecast has also been selling the software to operators that have opted to build their own CDNs. Monday's announcement is EdgeCast's first public acknowledgement of this part of the business.

The company is also saying that one Tier 1 U.S. carrier is running one of these licensed CDNs. EdgeCast isn't allowed to say who, but a report a year ago said it was AT&T Inc..

Why this matters
Why bother announcing the licensing business when "everybody in town knows we do this," as EdgeCast President James Segil puts it? Because EdgeCast wants to be known for having a head start on competitors, particularly Akamai Technologies Inc., when it comes to bragging about federating CDNs -- that is, connecting CDNs to one another for expanded reach.

Akamai is big on the idea, as are some carriers and vendors. Alcatel-Lucent is working in this direction with its CloudBand architecture, for instance.

Standing out as a frontrunner might be particularly important considering there are no standards for CDN federation yet.

For more
Recent CDN news:

— Craig Matsumoto, West Coast Editor, Light Reading


Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Network Computing encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Network Computing moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Network Computing further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
 
Related Content
Most Popular
Read
White Papers SPONSORED CONTENT
Featured
Resource Library SPONSORED CONTENT
Interlaken
A chip-to-chip interface useful in 100G