Telecom Ramblings

Content delivery network Edgecast has found itself another carrier partner, this time in the southern Hemisphere.  Today they are announcing an agreement with Australian service provider AAPT, who will join Global Crossing and DT in partnering their way into the CDN business.  Australia tends to be a tough place for outsiders to distribute content due to the low population density and long distances both to and within the region.  Therefore, such a partnership is probably the ideal way for a CDN like EdgeCast to enter the market in force.

AAPT will resell access to Edgecast’s global content delivery network – in fact they are apparently doing so already – for a slice of the proceeds, thus enter the CDN business without actually having to develop one from scratch.  Edgecast gains the benefit of AAPT’s presence and knowledge of the networking terrain down under, which means they can expand here without having to dilute their efforts geographically as much as they otherwise might have.  And AAPT has some infrastructure already in place for this, which might be involved.

Last fall AAPT said it was working on its own ‘commercial cache’ service, to complement its relationships with Akamai, Limelight, and yes, Edgecast, each of which had servers already embedded in its network of course.  This new agreement apparently grew out of those efforts, whether it started out that way or the homegrown efforts proved more difficult than expected.