Verizon intros new offerings for CDNs

Verizon Communications today announced new transport service offerings designed specifically for content owners and content delivery networks (CDNs), allowing them to connect directly to Verizon’s local and regional Internet servers and pay far less than they would for traditional IP transit services.

Verizon won’t say how much less expensive the new offerings are, but in a press release today, the company said rates would depend in part on the number and location of each customer’s connections as well as bandwidth requirements at each location and in aggregate.

The savings come in large part by allowing customers to bypass intermediary carriers and connect directly into Verizon’s Internet servers in 10 colocation centers nationwide, including San Jose, Dallas, Ashburn, Va., and other popular data center sites.

“Our [IP transit] offerings have been gold-plated services to the enterprise market,” said Boh Dupree, Verizon’s group marketing manager. “This [new offering] now acknowledges that the content community’s traffic flows in very different ways. We’re trying to let them know they don’t have to come in through traditional enterprise pricing and services. We’re kind of rewarding them for making copies of their traffic so we don’t have to carry it long-distance across our network.”

To distinguish content owners and CDNs from enterprise customers, Verizon will examine each prospective customer’s traffic profile, recognizing that CDNs have much higher ingress-to-egress traffic ratios. Verizon has created three different tiers of traffic profiles with which customers must comply in order to qualify for the new services. If customers stray from those requirements, they’ll be notified, and if they don’t comply, they will simply pay regular IP transit prices.

The new offering is not connected with the content delivery network Verizon announced in November using equipment from Velocix.