Verizon Confirms EdgeCast Acquisition, Adding Over 6K Customers To Its Content Delivery Business
Verizon is indeed going to acquire EdgeCast Networks, a content delivery network founded in 2008 that has grown to be one of the fastest-growing Internet companies in the world.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days after TechCrunch reported a price above $350 million, Verizon has made the EdgeCast Networks purchase official, converting a rumored deal into a confirmed one that folds more than 6,000 CDN customers into its content delivery operation. The pickup traveled unusually far on day one — PR Newswire, InfoWorld, ZDNet, Data Center Knowledge, Gigaom, VentureBeat, CNET, and StreamingMediaBlog all carried it.
The deal is not an isolated bet: it extends a pattern Verizon set with its 2011 purchase of CloudSwitch to add a software play beyond the network itself. Coming days after Verizon completed the $130 billion buyout of Vodafone's stake in Verizon Wireless and tripled 4G capacity in major cities, the company is spending at every layer — ownership, spectrum infrastructure, and now application-level delivery.
First-order effects
- EdgeCast's 6,000-plus customers wake up owned by a tier-one carrier, with their delivery contracts and support relationships migrating under Verizon's content delivery business.
Second-order effects
- Standalone CDN vendors now compete against a rival whose cost basis includes the underlying Verizon network, pressuring pricing for enterprise delivery contracts.
Third-order effects
- If the CloudSwitch-then-EdgeCast sequence holds, carriers will keep buying application-layer companies rather than building them, shifting CDN market structure toward network owners who control both the pipe and the delivery layer.
The trend: US carriers are using acquisition-led expansion to climb the stack from bandwidth into content delivery and software services, with Verizon buying capability layer by layer.