Level 3 Expands CDN Footprint on Five Continents

It’s been nearly seven years since they acquired the one-time Digital Island assets from Savvis back in 2006 for $135M, but Level 3’s content delivery network is definitely coming of age. Today they announced a broad global footprint expansion, adding more than two dozen nodes across Europe, Asia, Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

The new PoPs add depth in Europe and breadth everywhere else:

• Europe: Warsaw, Oslo, Reykjavik, Sofia, Moscow, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, and St. Petersburg
• Middle East: Doha and Dubai
• Africa: Cairo, Djibouti, Nairobi, Mombasa, Cape Town, and Johannesburg
• Asia-Pacific: Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Singapore, and Sydney.
• Latin America: Sao Paolo, Santiago, Bogota, Quito, Ecuador, Mexico City, Lima

With the Global Crossing integration largely complete, Level 3’s global backbone goes to a lot of these places, but for Africa, Asia, and the Pacific it’s on leased submarine capacity of course.   Having CDN nodes in place will make it easier for them to start selling more products in those parts of the world, and it may also give them a greater rationale for international M&A moves.  After all, I suspect the Reliance Globalcom assets have not yet found their final home yet even now.

After the Q3 earnings call where they reported 37% growth in CDN revenue over the same quarter last year, Dan Rayburn said (and I concur) that Level 3 has taken over the #2 CDN slot behind Akamai globally in terms of revenue. There’s still a large gap to cover before they’re near the #1 slot of course, but it’s a big part of their drive to sustained higher CNS revenue growth as a whole.

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Categories: Content Distribution · Internet Backbones