Level 3 boosts Asia-Pac CDN

Level 3 Communications today announced expansion of its content delivery network into the Asia-Pacific region to include its first coverage in China, and expanded capacity and features in others areas as well.

The goal of this expansion is to enable Level 3’s North American and European customers, such as Yahoo, to reach the Asia-Pac audience, said Lisa Guillaume, vice president of product management for Level 3’s content markets group.

“Level 3 has been in Asia since we acquired Savvis assets two years ago now, but we haven’t put any capacity into the existing sites or expanded into more locations,” Guillaume said. “With this expansion, we increase our capacity by a factor of 10 in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, and we add three sites in China. Also, we have extended the Level 3 caching and downloading platform into each of these locations.”

Level 3 will not be expanding its sales staff in Asia-Pac, since it is focused on delivering more eyeballs to its North American and European customers, Guillaume said. While the company has had a presence in Asia, Level 3 has not been able to sell aggressively due to limitations on the existing equipment, said Laurie Schrager, director of product management for content markets.

“Our assets in Asia were so under-invested, the hardware was dated, so we haven’t been able to sell into Asia,” Schrager said. “Now we have replaced all hardware with new servers and renegotiated all contracts. Most of our service-provider partners are already Level 3 customers, and we have good relationships with them, which allowed us to lower our cost basis.”

The move was driven by specific demands from Level 3 customers in each of its four major customer segments -- gaming, software, social media or user-generated content and media/entertainment. Guillaume said.