A CDN For Hibernia

My content delivery M&A speculation the other day may have seemed far-fetched, but little did I know that there was another network operator out there about to enter the CDN waters. Hibernia Networks has in fact taken the plunge, launching its HiberniaCDN offering on Monday.

The expansion into CDN follows closely last summer’s purchase of Atrato IP Networks, which gave the company an IP backbone of its own. In addition to transit and such, Atrato had offered managed services for CDN infrastructure. Hibernia appears to have taken that idea and invested the necessary resources to build one of their own.  The post-bubble days when Hibernia was a submarine cable and little else are long past.

That’s not to say Hibernia hasn’t been investing in the content world for a long of course. With the purchase of MediaXstream back in 2009 and their more recent transaction for Teliasonera’s video biz, they’ve been active on the broadcast side for a long time. Adding not only an IP backbone but a CDN to go with that takes them down a similar path as, say, Level 3 — albeit on a smaller scale so far.

I do think that IP networks moving to integrate CDN technologies more tightly will be an ongoing trend for the sector. The idea that IP networks and CDNs will become increasingly intertwined is not a new one, but it has taken a while to win converts. With Verizon’s EdgeCast purchase and Hibernia’s new effort, the early movers into this space (e.g. Level 3 and Tata) will soon find the neighborhood a bit less lonely.

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Categories: Content Distribution · Undersea cables