Is Akamai Announcing A New P2P Delivery Service Next Week?

That’s the question I keep getting asked by people the past few days. Seems many are speculating that Akamai may announce a new P2P based delivery offering next week to coincide with their financial analyst summit. I don’t know the date Akamai will announce such an offering, but I do expect one to come before the end of the year. Many in the industry are closely watching to see which traditional CDN provider is the first to offer a hybrid service.

VeriSign and CacheLogic both offer hybrid delivery today, but VeriSign bought Kontiki to get their P2P product offering and has been working to build out its traditional CDN service. And CacheLogic was built from P2P technology from the start and like VeriSign, has also been putting their efforts behind adding traditional CDN services. So Akamai would be the first CDN not built from P2P technology to offer the service if they announced it next week.

I also hear that Internap and Level 3 are working on P2P based offerings for video as well, so it seems the race is on amongst the CDNs to see who will offer it first, aside from some of the work the CDNs do already with BitTorrent.