Australian Telco Telstra Launches New Content Delivery Network For Video

Yesterday, Australian based Telstra announced the initial launch of their new content delivery network across their IP backbone with nine nodes deployed around Australia. The company also detailed their plans to spend $14M over the next three to five years to further expand their CDN and cloud computing efforts by building out twelve "network and media centers" at some of their existing ethernet aggregation points. The company's new CDN was deployed over the past nine months with help from Cisco.

Telstra executives commented that the new CDN will enable them to reduce their backhaul costs, lower their network latency and give them a footprint to put content closer to the customer. Michael Lawrey, executive director of network and technology at Telstra Operations was quoted as saying, "We also have flexibility building our own CDN that we wouldn't have with the likes of Akamai."

While some might interpret this quote as an indication that telcos and other carriers are moving away from using or working with the pure-play CDNs, that's not the case. For a regional carrier like Telstra, who only delivers content in Australia, it makes a lot of sense for them to build their own CDN in-house. Setting up a CDN to cover one region is not that costly nor difficult for a company that already own the network. But trying to do it on a global scale, across many different product lines, that's a completely different story. I expect we will continue to see more announcements of regional carriers and ISPs building out their own CDN services, but we have yet to see any indication in the market that the global carriers and telcos plan to follow suit. From what they are saying, that's still a few years off.

Comments

[Kevin]

I wonder if Limelight will try to partner with them ala Canada and India. Since they only have 1 location in Sydney and half of the ISP's in Australia are still getting Limelight Content from Asia due to poor peering arrangements in Australia.

And Akamai only has 2 pops, 1 in Sydney and the other on the otherside of the continent somewhere, Perth maybe. (I can't account for co-located within all ISP's though) Numerous ISP's in Australia are also pulling Akamai content from Asia.

[LBP]

Good news, Cisco is good solution for that.

[HmmConvenient]

All of these CDNs telcos are building are meaningless without some technology capable of traffic shaping on and off net traffic. Specifically, it would be great if Telstra, AT&T, Level3 and others could reach out to media companies and sell them on network transit from their CDN at a significant discount to traffic delivered via a peer. You'd need something in the Flash/ Silverlight/ * Player to manage this delivery or intelligence and/or a nifty piece of network equipment upstream. In either case, this would actually allow these CDNs to capture some traffic while providing a benefit to the network owner by decreasing total outbound requests.

Otherwise, this is yet another me too CDN product that will fail to scale.

[medea]

Kevin, Akamai definitely have more than 2 pops in Australia. I've setup live streams on a weekly basis over the past 2 years and have seen pops in every capital city (infact I've seen multiple pops in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane)