Pacnet content delivery network goes live

Asia Pacific operator Pacnet launched its content delivery network (CDN) service in Tokyo today, with four regional points-of-presence (PoPs) and a global footprint via a partnership with EdgeCast.
 
Pacnet CDN, which is available now across all of Pacnet’s global locations, offers four main content service suites: delivery, acceleration, origin storage and value added services including security, management and reporting tools.
 
Jon Vestal, Pacnet’s vice president of CDN products, strategy and management, says the company is initially targeting “large enterprises, multimedia companies, online download gaming companies and traditional distributors of large content”.
 
Pacnet, which is headquartered in Hong Kong and Singapore, has established CDN PoPs in Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia, with additional nodes to be added in the coming months that will span ten countries in Asia Pacific. The operator claims its wholly-owned infrastructure offers it a regional advantage in the CDN space in terms of footprint, speed, reliability, security and a lower cost base.
 
Also, its partnership with EdgeCast gives Pacnet a global footprint via EdgeCast’s OpenCDN federation, says Vestal.
 
“That allows us to focus our PoP locations in Asia, which is a market we know and we have the strongest relationships in the network infrastructure, and we can ride on the PoPs of the other federation members for - for lack of a better word - off-net termination into the markets that they know best,” Vestal told Telecoms Europe.net.
 
Pacnet also talked up Japan is a key location in its CDN strategy in Asia, as the Japan CDN PoP is the closest to the US, which makes it “the primary PoP that will accelerate the Internet experience of users in North America who are accessing content from other locations in Asia.”
 
The operator first announced plans to get into the CDN space with its EdgeCast partnership in September this year.
 

Pacnet is hoping to tap into the CDN market that is being driven in Asia by growing demand for digital content – particularly for video and mobile content – as fixed and mobile broadband penetration continue to grow. Frost & Sullivan tips the CDN market to be worth over $4 billion (€2.9 billion) globally by 2015, with video CDN alone accounting for 44% of that figure.