IP (Internet Protocol) services and hosting company Broadwing Communications and intelligent routing service company Internap Network Services Corp., announced agreements Thursday with content delivery services company Akamai Technologies Inc., each pledging to resell Akamai services.
Broadwing Communications, the fibre-optic backbone subsidiary of Broadwing Inc., will add Akamai’s EdgeSuite service, a set of content delivery services bundling many of Akamai’s offerings, to the company’s managed hosting and collocation services.
Broadwing has built an 18,000-mile (28,800 kilometres) optical fibre network, while Akamai relies on partnerships with fibre owners to provide its own server-based edge-of-network services, said Chris Turner, Akamai’s vice president for channel distribution.
“We give a company like Broadwing or Internap, or any of our content delivery partners, the ability to bring content to the edge,” he said. “We fill a gap for them.”
Internap signed a similar deal to sell Akamai services along with its own, said Bill Hankes, a spokesman for Internap. Internap has no fibre network of its own. Internap works to improve the speed data moves within the Internet for its customers, while Akamai works to move that data out of the Internet to the edge of the network, Hankes said.
Broadwing, in Austin, Tex., can be contacted at http://www.broadwing.com/. Internap, in Seattle, can be reached at http://www.internap.com/. Akamai, in Cambridge, Mass., can be reached at http://www.akamai.com/.