According to Cowen & Company Analyst Colby Synesael, he believes that Comcast is “highly likely” to acquire Level 3 or Zayo, because building a national fiber network would be too expensive, not to mention time consuming. With Comcast raking in $2.1B in Net Income on June 30, 2015, it could afford to acquire Zayo and Level 3 any day of the week. The first thing or person that comes to mind is Jan van Doorn, the super gifted software architect who led the Comcast CDN engineering team in building a national CDN platform, from the ground up, with open source software.
For Jan, a combined CDN entity would be a bummer, because Comcast is likely to standardize on the Level 3 CDN platform, and all of Jan’s work will go up in smoke. On the bright side, Jan and Team will have first hand experience in all things CDN. Comcast CDN + Level 3 CDN would be a big story, because a combined CDN entity would catapult them into #2 Video-based CDN in the US, right behind Akamai, in terms of PoP density, capabilities, potential, etc. Also, its possible some of Akamai’s business via NBC and other Comcast properties might switch over to Comcast, but that’s so far into the future, its not worth discussing now. “Disclaimer: I’m not a financial analyst, so don’t use this rant as investment advice.”