Level 3 announced today it has expanded its CDN capabilities by tenfold in Asian markets. Level 3 gained a footprint in Asia with its Dec. 2006 acquisition of Savvis's CDN network, some of which was in Asian markets.

To this point, Level 3 had offered North American and European companies backbone support to Asian nations on the Savvis infrastructure. But Savvis's existing network could not handle increases in demand and bandwidth expansion in many of the countries, much of which comes from online video [1] and other rich content delivery. The newly turned up Level 3 network now provides more scalable and cost-effective content delivery to Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.

Lisa Guilluame, vice president of CDN services for Level 3, said Yahoo! is the lead customer on the new expansion.

"As we expanded to new customers and segments, we realized a lot of our customers' business plans involved reaching the Asian markets," Guilluame said. "With Level 3's increased footprint and capacity in this region, customers can now play one price for all of their CDN needs across Asian, North American and European markets."

Level 3 also announced its first foray into China with this expansion. Guilluame said expanding into China was a "major feat, a major undertaking" that required significant negotiation.

Guilluame stressed the benefit of the expansion for Level 3's customers. "The improved services give our customers increased performance in the region, a decrease in their global costs and lets them avoid trans-Pacific delivery." 

For more:
- see the Level 3 release here [2] 

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