EdgeCast On A Roll, Launches In Latin America With Samba Tech

Over the last few months, CDN EdgeCast has shown a lot of success with getting companies like Deutsche Telekom, Global Crossing and NaviSite to resell their delivery network in the U.S. and Europe. Now, EdgeCast is taking that approach to the Latin American market and has signed up Samba Tech to resell their streaming, edge storage, caching, and high-speed delivery services.

Samba Tech is one of the leaders in the South American market and have essentially locked up all the major media groups in Brazil including projects with 3 of 4 largest TV Stations and some of the largest media publishers including SBT, Brazil’s second-largest television station, and Atletico-MG, one of the largest soccer teams in Brazil. Sporting events are a big business down there and EdgeCast has been delivering this content for many months now

What's interesting about delivering content in Latin America is that there is less peering between ISPs in the region than in the U.S. so many times, much of the traffic between countries like Brazil to Argentina first goes back to the U.S. and then back down instead of exchanging over peering in their region. As a result, EdgeCast and most other CDNs can deliver content faster over their networks even if the content is being served from North America than users experience currently in the Latin American market with local content. EdgeCast is serving all of their Latin American traffic today from their POPs in the southern part of North America and said that customers who tested their service against the other big CDNs found it to be just as fast if not faster than CDNs who say they have local POPs in the region.

That said, while EdgeCast does not have any POPs in Latin America yet, they will be building out locally through both direct and indirect relationships over the next 12-18 months as they feel that having local POPs will offer better performance over the long term. EdgeCast is also working with additional partnerships in other regions of Latin America as well.

EdgeCast is really on a roll right now. They continue to sign up a lot of major resellers, have over 300 customers and have only raised $10M to get where they are today. It's only a matter of time before a telco or larger player takes them out of the market and it won't be a fire sale.