The day has finally arrived. Comcast Wholesale, a division of Comcast, officially launched its B2C CDN. What started off as an internally built caching platform designed to support its own VOD delivery efforts, is now a stand alone service being offered to content owners across the nation. The Comcast CDN is a new business model in the ecosystem, in that they are the only Cable Operator CDN in the world using open source software. It was initially designed to support internal OTT efforts, then re-packaged and rolled out as an enterprise B2C CDN, crafted to meet the needs of media, entertainment and broadcasters. The two existing CDNs that resemble Comcast CDN the most are VDMS (Verizon) and Level 3.
Comcast CDN has 100 PoPs deployed in North America, making them the #2 in PoP count after Akamai. Comcast calls their CDN PoPs “cache nodes”, which might sound a little confusing to some, since a cache node sounds similar to a cache server. The Comcast CDN runs Apache Traffic Server, the open source caching software used by Apple and Yahoo. At the present time, the Comcast CDN is a plain vanilla offering with a limited feature-set, but over time it will expand as they hire more CDN engineers. Will Comcast CDN grow revenues as fast as the pure-play CDNs? The answer is it depends on the type of sales reps they hire to sell their CDN services. If they hire telecom reps and reps fresh out of college, it will take a couple of years to get things going. If they hire experienced veterans at the six figure base salary + commission, it will be much faster.
Comcast Wholesale
- Comcast CDN is part of Comcast Wholesale
- Comcast Wholesale is a division of Comcast Cable
- # of Employees of Comcast Wholesale – LinkedIn: 80
- Number of CDN PoPs: 100
- Products: CDN, Dedicated Internet, Media Management, Transmission (fiber network or satellite), AdDelivery for TV/Radio Spots, and Production Services
- Comcast CDN Architecture
