Welcome to the latest installment of Dan Rayburn's Streaming Insights & Intelligence, a new weekly insights column on StreamTV Insider where the industry analyst puts facts and figures to the news you need to know about. Join the discussion on LinkedIn and check back each week as he unpacks key industry happenings.
Here’s what Rayburn is tracking for the week of January 22, 2024: Qwilt and Cirion partner for full LATAM CDN coverage; Lumen starts shutting down its CDN.
Qwilt has announced a deal with Cirion Technologies to deploy Qwilt’s edge cache software and cloud services across Lumen's former CDN footprint in LATAM.
In 2022, Lumen sold its LATAM infrastructure (network, peering, hardware) to Cirion, one of the few Pan-Latin American networks operating one of Latin America's most interconnected data center platforms, with 18 owned data centers. Their long haul and metro networks comprise 31,000 miles and over 22,000 miles of subsea network, with 13 Tbps of total CDN capacity.
Key Takeaway: With this partnership, Qwilt gets full LATAM CDN coverage through the Cirion infrastructure and peering in the region. Cirion gets Qwilt CDN tech and access to their SP-embedded edge deployments throughout LATAM. Qwilt will run this CDN service and jointly sell with Cirion, expanding Cirion's footprint and CDN services in the region. Neither company is disclosing how much total capacity Qwilt will build across Cirion's network, but we should expect to get more details as their edge services start to roll out this year.
Lumen has started shutting down their CDN.
The company was one of the CDNs in the mix, along with Akamai, Amazon, Edgio, Fastly, and Qwilt, for delivering the NFL Wild Card game on Peacock, with the game being the last big event for Lumen's CDN.
Now that the game is over, multiple ISPs are reporting that Lumen has stopped sending traffic, and the de-provisioning of their CDN has started. Lumen had recently refreshed some of their CDN hardware, so some assets are expected to be redeployed for Lumen's Edge Bare Metal product offering. At the peak of their CDN business, Lumen was generating about $200 million in revenue. Once they lost traffic from Apple and later on Disney, the business started to decline.
In August 2022, Lumen sold off their Latin American operations, including all of Lumen’s fiber assets and data centers in Latin America and their subsea assets. In October of last year, Lumen announced the sale of "select" contracts to Akamai, comprised of about 100 enterprise customers and the "end-of-sale of Lumen’s CDN services."
For a little CDN history lesson, in 1999, Sandpiper, one of the earliest CDNs on the internet, was acquired by Digital Island. In 2001, Digital Island was acquired by Cable & Wireless. In 2002, Cable & Wireless withdrew from the U.S. market and sold the U.S. company to SAVVIS. In 2006, SAVVIS excited the CDN business and sold the CDN assets to Level 3. In 2017, Level 3 was acquired by CenturyLink, and in 2020, CenturyLink changed its name to Lumen.
Key Takeaway: For many years, Lumen was a great CDN under the Level 3 brand supporting a lot of big name customers and many large scale live streaming events, including some of the first Olympic games. After the acquisition, CenturyLink said they planned to continue to support the commercial CDN services of Level 3, but over time, they never really focused on the business.
Dan Rayburn is an analyst in the streaming media industry, with regular TV appearances on CNBC, Bloomberg TV, and Schwab Network amongst others. He is conference Chairman for the NAB Show Streaming Summit in Las Vegas each year, and his streamingmediablog.com website is one of the most widely read sites for broadcasters, content owners, OTT providers, Wall Street money managers, and industry executives. He also has a podcast at danrayburnpodcast.com. He can be reached at [email protected]
Dan Rayburn’s Streaming Analysis & Insights is an opinion column. It does not necessarily represent the opinions of StreamTV Insider.