Int’l Bytes: Netflix, Cisco, Hurricane Electric

Here are a few international items from yesterday and today that are worth noting:

Netflix’s global expansion opened the floodgates yesterday. CEO Reed Hastings says the OTT provider went live in 130 more countries, putting it in all corners of the globe except China, North Korea, Syria, and the Crimean peninsula. Of course, China being a sizeable fraction of the world’s population, they’ve still got a big chunk left to go. But adding 130 countries in one fell swoop doesn’t mean Netflix built out its own CDN infrastructure into each of them all of a sudden. Rather, they’re surely using transit providers to reach places where their business won’t stretch the infrastructure right away. Wired has some thoughts on that side of things that are worth a read.

Also on the content delivery front, Shaw is simplifying its homegrown CDN operations for its new FreeRange TV. With the help of Cisco’s Open Media Distribution solutions, the Canadian cable operator is adding local caching and multiscreen streaming capabilities out at the edge. Shaw has been quite active of late, buying Viawest not so long ago and in December buying Wind to add a mobile dimension.

And in the transit backbone arena, Hurricane Electric has added yet another country to its global IPv4/IPv6 network reach. They’ve added a point of presence in Helsinki, their first in Finland. The new PoP is in the Pasila Broadcast Tower located at the Digita Data Center, Radiokatu 5B. HE has been aggressively expanding the reach of its IP backbone worldwide for several years now.

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Categories: Cable · Content Distribution · Internet Backbones · Telecom Equipment