CDN Roundup: Rackspace, Verizon, CloudFront

It's been a busy week for the content delivery network (CDN) sector, as Amazon's launch of its CloudFront has been followed by several significant developments that further expand options for CDN customers:

• Verizon (VZ) announced that it has deployed a dedicated peer-to-peer content delivery network on its infrastructure. Verizon will use technology from Velocix that can cache popular content, and then seeds the files from servers within the ISP’s network, reducing network traffic. Verizon's approach offers interesting decisions for content providers who are currently using Akamai or Limelight but covet Verizon's FiOS customer base. See additional coverage and analysis at Contentinople and Telecom Ramblings.
• Rackspace's Mosso unit has launched its CDN, which allows CloudFiles customers to use Limelight Networks to deliver their files. Gartner's Lydia Leong compared it with Amazon's new CloudFront CDN: "Competitively, it seems like Rackspace’s Cloud Files plus Limelight may turn out to be the stronger offering," Leong writes. "The price of Rackspace/Limelight is slightly higher, but apparently there’s no origin retrieval charge, and Limelight has a broader footprint and therefore probably better global performance."
• In that same post, Gartner's Leong also provided an assessment of the impact of Amazon's CDN. She writes: "Some people will undoubtedly excitedly hype CloudFront as a game-changer. It’s not. It’s certainly yet another step towards having ubiquitous edge delivery of all popular static content, and the prices are attractive at low to moderate volumes, but high-volume customers can and will get steeper discounts from established players with bigger footprints and a richer feature set. It’s a logical move on Amazon’s part, and a useful product that’s going to find a large audience, but it’s not going to majorly shake up the CDN industry, other than to accelerate the doom of small undifferentiated providers who were already well on their way to rolling into the fiery pit of market irrelevance and insolvency."