Verizon Digital Media Services (VDMS) announced Wednesday it is expanding its global footprint into Africa, France and Mexico. The end-to-end media platform provider announced three new PoPs in three continents for its Edgecast content delivery network in Q1 2018.
In November 2017, VDMS established network presence in Africa for the first with its launch of a PoP in Johannesburg, South Africa. VDMS reported an immediate exponential growth in traffic, saying “within a two-week period, the PoP experienced a fourfold increase in throughput (speed), and 80 percent improvement in latency (quickness) according to third-party quality monitoring tools, resulting in a nine-times boost in traffic.”
In the first quarter of this year, VDMS will launch a new Super PoP in Marseille, France, which connects VDMS to Africa from the opposite end of the continent. France’s second largest city has become a major Internet hub thanks to its location in Southern Europe and geographic proximity to North Africa and the Middle East. Marseilles is already one of the leading subsea hubs in the world, and is currently adding two new submarine cables and increasing capacity on existing ones. Verizon said, “The new PoP will be a welcomed opportunity to meet growing customer demand, especially in major mobile-first markets like North Africa.”
Meanwhile in Mexico, the company expanded into the nation’s capital, Mexico City, in December 2017. It already has PoPs in Santiago de Querétaro and Puebla. According to VDMS, “These three cities were specifically selected with incumbent networks in the country to ensure optimal quality with a clear path to further scaling, as quality boosts lead to increased traffic growth”. The company’s CDN is directly connected to 95 per cent of Mexico’s ISP consumers.
VDMS said that its continued international expansion was essential for its service to remain of the highest quality.
“In a world that’s more plugged into mobile devices than ever before, there is a critical need for digital media delivery to be secure, fast and of the highest quality – especially in fast-growing, mobile-centric markets,” said Kyle Okamoto, chief network officer for Verizon Digital Media Services. “Through continued automation, essential network and data center partnerships and finely tuned operations, we have exceeded expectations in scaling our network to meet today’s and tomorrow’s digital media delivery demands. We are wholly committed to continuing to invest and build out our CDN to ensure the best quality experience across gaming, application acceleration, e-commerce, media and entertainment and more.”
The CDN now has 125 PoPs across 56 countries over five continents. According to RapidTV News journalist Joseph O’Halloran, its network capacity has increased accordingly by over 200%.