Global Crossing teams with Limelight, EdgeCast for CDN services

Global Crossing has signed a deal with content delivery network providers Limelight and EdgeCast that will give Global Crossing customers access to CDN services.

Global Crossing says that it wanted to offer CDN services to its customers from multiple vendors to give them flexibility in choosing the services that best meet their needs. An enterprise customer could use both Limelight and EdgeCast CDNs to deliver their content depending upon which service works better for different protocols, for example.

“If a customer wants to send out a Windows Media Player stream with one vendor and then have a Flash on-demand video with another vendor, then there’s a lot of different ways we can implement that,” says Al Sadowski, the senior product manager at Global Crossing. “A lot of times our customers want to diversify their CDNs.”

Sadowski says that Global Crossing isn’t currently in negotiations with other CDN vendors such as Akamai to sign up for similar agreements, but he adds that Global Crossing would be open to signing up more CDN vendors in the future. Global Crossing currently has a similar arrangement for offering managed network services with both Juniper and Cisco.

CDNs are networks that sit on the edge of other ISPs’ networks and ensure the quality of requested content over the Web. CDNs are designed to deliver content based on geographical location, meaning that content requests are delivered by the network that is in closet proximity to the end user.