Carrier activities in the CDN market - An exploratory analysis and strategic implications

The commercial structure of the Internet is changing. Content delivery networks (CDN) are becoming potent players in the bandwidth market and are responsible for an ever growing fraction of total Internet traffic. Carriers on the other hand are looking for strategies to escape the “dumb pipe” scenario and are increasingly seeing added value services as a way out. Several Tier-1 carriers are expanding their business models into content delivery which appears as a natural extension of their core business in an upstream direction. In this paper, the trend is discussed based on case examples. Resource based view is applied to provide economic reasoning.