Bell Canada To Build CDN With Limelight Networks

This morning, Bell announced an exclusive partnership with Limelight Networks on a new CDN offering, targeting content owners in Canada. While this is not the first telco Limelight has worked with, the Bell partnership is unique since Bell won't simply be re-selling Limelight's service or licensing their technology. Instead, Bell is placing Limelight servers in their co-lo facilities, tying them into their IP network and using Limelight to operate and maintain the CDN.

This is a multi-million dollar deal for Limelight and the two companies have already lined up family.ca, themovienetwork.ca and superecran.com as the first clients who will use the new CDN. While the market for CDN services in Canada is still small when compared to the U.S., projections I have seen from Cisco say the total CDN market in Canada, for video and non-video content, was $106M last year, growing to $174M by the end of 2010.

Bell marks the latest of a long list of telcos and carriers that have entered the CDN market in the past twelve months and there will be more to come. You can see the entire list of telcos and carriers offering CDN services at www.cdnlist.com