AT&T Preps CDN Offering

Since December, AT&T has been busy working on the build out and expects to spend between $70-$80 million on infrastructure this year. By the end of 2008, AT&T is aiming to have 400Gbps of capacity online, for all their content delivery services, which would increase their capacity by 4x what they have now. When completed, their content delivery services will be delivered from 32 nodes in 7 countries and they will be Adobe Flash Certified by year's end and will be supporting live and on-demand delivery for all the major formats.

The cost advantage comes from AT&T owning its network, since Akamai leases capacity from carriers like, well, AT&T. Akamai, not surprisingly, disputes that owning a backbone network would be a built-in cost advantage. "AT&T and Level 3 claim their cost structure is lower, but I'd love to see the numbers," says David Belson, senior competitive analyst for Akamai. Belson claims Akamai has the upper hand, because its network serves files from within ISP networks, rather than traveling over backbone networks to reach end users.