Tuesday Roundup 2/28: Akamai, Highwinds, Cross River, ZColo

The news cup runneth over, with MWC still going on, MetroConnect kicking off today, and few earnings reports coming out too,  So let’s first catch up on some of the other news out recently:

Remember when Akamai and Ericsson teamed up for mobile content delivery strategy a little over a year ago?  Well, the strategic alliance is now more than vaporware, as the two unveiled their Mobile Cloud Accelerator at MWC yesterday.  The technology is already in place at Indonesia’s Telkomsel, lowering page load times by as much as 70% according to the operator. Much has happened in the CDN space since this alliance was formed, and I’m curious whether Cotendo’s mobile cdn tech will be merged with this effort or if it will be a separate project.

In another section of the CDN sector, Highwinds picked up a customer for its SelectPath load balancing technology. ZEDO, and advertising technology partner for publishers, will be using Highwind’s service to optimize content delivery across multiple CDNs, i.e. not just their own. The idea is that multi-sourcing your content delivery needs can also lead to faster overall delivery – since no one CDN goes everywhere the fastest. Technology from Cedexis, which I have been hearing more and more about lately, underlies Highwinds’ service.  The CDN space overall is moving more and more toward cooperative efforts, be they federations or simply better utilization of multiple sources such as this.

On the metro fiber front, new New Jersey entrant Cross River Fiber said yesterday that it has completed construction of their first route. The 23.25km express route between Carteret and Newark connects the key carrier hotels at 1400 Federal Blvd and 165 Halsey. Cross River now claims the shortest linear distance, which will give them a boost from the low latency trading marketplace. They have more routes under construction throughout the region that we will no doubt here more about as the year unfolds.

And last week, Zayo’s zColo division picked up some business from the European gaming industry. Swedish gaming service provider Game-Hosting GH AB will be using their colocation services to help with their US expansion plans. Zayo has 13 locations around the country now, having added facilities in Chicago (organically) and Las Vegas (inorganically) recently.

 

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Categories: Content Distribution · Datacenter · Metro fiber