Global Cloud Exchange, the international bandwidth arm of Reliance Communications, has been busy back on its home turf of India. Today GCX and its parent announced a new CDN in the country, which is named Fast Edge.
India has long been a tough nut for international network operators to crack, whether it be fiber, wireless or data center, or targeting wholesale or consumer opportunities. Global CDNs have a presence, of course, via help from local partners partners, but little depth relative to the size of the market. The country's Byzantine regulatory and tax systems are largely to blame.
Given its home field advantage, GCX's new initiative looks to take advantage of that situation by leveraging its national network and data center infrastructure in the country. Thus, they've deployed content caches aroundn the country and connected the back to 9 of their data centers in the main hubs of Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad and then on to the rest of the world via their undersea cables.
Just how GCX plans to take this offering to market is an interesting question. Will they take it directly to content providers interested in the Indian market? Or will they seek international CDN partners looking for a better Indian option?
Rival Tata of course also has a CDN, which was built out of the BitGravity acquisition and surely has a significant Indian presence as well. The news of a telecom building out a CDN is a bit retro in today's market, where talk of the CDN opportunity has died down a lot since the frenzy of 5-6 years ago.
This article was authored by Rob Powell and was originally posted on Telecomramblings.com
Rob Powell is founder & editor of Telecom Ramblings, which was set up in 2008. The website is dedicated to discussing trends and developments in the telecom industry.