Telecom Ramblings

Taking its CDN business into eastern Europe, Level 3 Communications [NASDAQ:LVLT - chart, news, filings], announced a deal with Czech-based Internet Billboard.  Level 3 will provide caching, download, and traffic management througout the region, including the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Russia. The new capabilities will help Internet Billboard to centralize and streamline its ad delivery capabilities.  As revenue goes, this probably isn’t a huge contact, although in this environment almost any contract is a good one.  In this case though, it is more about reach with Level 3 extending the company’s CDN efforts to the far eastern edge of its network.

Like in Asia, the bandwidth market in Eastern Europe is growing rapidly, and it therefore has been an area that many fiber networks have been expanding into.   It is also an area where most CDN customers are new and are up for grabs, unlike the US where Akamai still has a huge existing marketshare.  So if one has the facilities, it’s a good place for fiber operators to gain a CDN foothold.  One would expect that TeliaSonera [ST:TLSN.ST - chart, news, filings] would be strong here once they get their own CDN running, and Interoute’s CDN is probably prowling around as well given their own assets in the region.