In a bid to attract new customers for its content-delivery network services, Level 3 announced today that it will be offering CDN services at the same rate that it charges for its high-speed Internet service.

Though CDNs are typically sold as premium services that can cost up to 30% more than standard high-speed Internet services, Level 3 says that it has enough backbone infrastructure to offer the service at the same rate that it offers for its standard high-speed Internet. In particular, the company says that since it already maintains a large high-speed Internet access business, it has the ability to deliver CDN service at roughly the same cost.

“This is not a special discount,” says Graham Williams, the director of caching and downloading services for Level 3. “It is a philosophical approach to how we price services to our customers.”

Dan Rayburn, the executive vice president for StreamingMedia.com who has written extensively about Level 3’s potential in the CDN market, says that Level 3’s ability to convert legacy customers to its CDN services will be key to its success in the market.

“It’s a smart move on their part,” he says. “This announcement is important because their transit customers can now subscribe to their CDN.”

Level 3, which has traditionally served as an Internet backbone provider for large firms, such as Microsoft, has been getting more aggressive over the past two years in broadening its portfolio of enterprise services. The company entered the CDN market earlier this year after it had completed its acquisition of Savvis’ CDN services business.

Level 3’s CDN services feature caching and downloading services that employ standards-based content-delivery models. Among the models that the company’s CDN services support are object delivery, which is typically used to deliver patches, file downloads and multimedia content to large groups of users; total site delivery, which can be configured to deliver technology such as Flash and ActiveX for individual domain names; and secure delivery, which specializes in delivering HTTPS content.