Telecommunications group Cable & Wireless Plc this week struck a three-year deal with Akamai Technologies for delveloping Akamai edge servers across Cable & Wireless global IP network.
Cable & Wireless introduced its Edge Collocation program earlier this month in a move to offer a high-end suite of hosting solutions to meet high-bandwidth requirements of broadband content providers e-commerce Web entities.
The Edge Collocation initiative is designed to facilitate international carriers and Internet service providers serving bandwidth-hungry clients.
As a part of the deal, Akamai will broadly deploy its content delivery servers at strategic locations on the edge of Cable & Wireless network, thereby expanding the global reach of Akamai s Internet content delivery network.
Zie Rivers, Cable & Wireless North America president, said adding Akamai s high performance services to deliver rich Internet content, and streaming media would eventually increase demand for its OC-192 global IP network.
“The implementation of Akamai s revolutionary technology at the edge of Cable & Wireless global IP network ensures that our customers have more efficient access to today s popular content,” Rivers said.
Cable & Wireless recently announced it reached a milestone with its aggressive effort to build out the world s first OC-192 10 Gigabit IP/MPLS circuit, enabling its network to carry more traffic faster, in a single, global hop.
Art Medici, Cable & Wireless senior vice president of marketing, said its engineers were working worldwide to complete the OC-192 build out.
We have a global engineering team working to deliver the OC-192 IP network on schedule, Medici said. On any given day we have 700 engineers working worldwide to attain our goal to complete the network by the end of 2001.
Internet pioneer Avi Freedman, Akamai vice president of network architecture, said the content facilitator was happy to work with Cable & Wireless because it owns and operates one of the most robust global IP networks in the world.
“With the advancements that Cable & Wireless is continuing to make to its global network, Akamai can leverage these strengths to deliver an improved end user experience,” Freedman said.
Under the agreement, Akamai will deploy its servers in U.S. and international points-of-presence over Cable & Wireless’ global IP network and in its data centers around the world.
In related news, Cable and Wireless conducted an informal survey at its annual ISPCON Luncheon in Orlando, Fla. this week.
Based on the interactive polling of ISP professionals, 87 percent said their ISP though it was important to develop value added services and transform their services under an ASP business model.
When the tier one global access provider asked the same group what was more important, uptime guarantees, online support, dedicated technical support or global network reach? Seventy-four percent said uptime guarantees were critical to today s service providers in order to maintain service level agreements with their clients.
Cable & Wireless Medici said the company has built online tools to prove what its IP network is capable of serving.
We re proud of our SLAs, and we re not bashful about comparing our network latency to other systems, Medici said. We report real-time traffic latency comparisons from any two city pairs online at http://www.ratings.miq.net. We re consistently at the top of the speed rate comparisons.
Cable & Wireless has streamlined its corporate structure over the past year. In doing so, it cast off several businesses worldwide, to focus on acquiring companies that would facilitate their IP network build out. In seven months Cable and Wireless acquired 11 European ISPs and 4 Web integrators to establish the third largest
IP service in the region.
According to Medici, the global telecom s name may no longer be accurate, its passion for speed remains entrenched in its mission to
“We re not serving cable access and we re not into wireless, I guess you could call us ampersand,” Medici quipped. “When your business is the Internet, it pays to be first to market. Cable and Wireless will be there with one network, offer global one-hop access, through one sales group. One is the name of the game.”
