Last month, I wrote a piece discussing the growing trend (and growing importance) of carriers entering and reshaping the CDN market. Well, here’s an update: The march continues, unabated.

Just within the last month, the following things have happened:
•    Global Crossing officially expanded its CDN reseller program to include both EdgeCast and Limelight Networks.

•    BT indicated that it will enter the CDN market by the end of 2009 with an internally developed offering.

•    TeliaSonera is expected to announce next month that it will enter the market in some fashion.

Full credit for both the BT and TeliaSonera news goes to Dan Rayburn at streamingmedia.com.

I cover in the previous piece what has happened thus far and how the carrier offerings will differ, both from each other and from pure-play CDNs. What I want to make note of here is the velocity at which this is happening. This makes four major global carriers (Deutsche Telekom, BT, TeliaSonera and Global Crossing) that have thrown their hat in the ring since the beginning of the year, in addition to further announcements from Verizon and AT&T that relate to the CDN space. Yankee Group has spoken to multiple other carriers that have yet to announce anything publicly, but are likely to produce some manner of CDN offering (most likely resale or whitelabel at first) within the next six months.

Also of note is where this activity is occurring. There was a time at which many international operators dismissed this trend as a concern primarily of their US colleagues. The argument was that CDN was of most strategic importance in the US, as that is where the majority of high-demand online video content is created. Therefore, it would be the US carriers that bear the greatest burden and have the most to potentially gain (in terms of cost and bandwidth reduction, as well as potential revenue) from a CDN offering. This supposition was buoyed by the fact that Level 3 and AT&T were the two notable first-movers.

Yet we know this argument to be false. We’ve now seen major incumbents in EMEA and APAC join the fray as well, and there are ongoing discussions from multiple carriers in Latin America and other parts of APAC about how they might sell CDN services. The reason? Even if high-volume content is still often produced in the US (and that is becoming decreasingly true, as a matter of fact), it is consumed globally. Therefore, any carriers with significant long haul assets charged with carrying a large amount of global traffic are gravitating towards this market.

The following graph shows the top 13 providers worldwide in terms of total IP traffic carried in 2008. It reads like a who’s who of providers that have entered the CDN market in the past two years. Level 3? #1. Global Crossing? #3. NTT? #5. AT&T? #7. TeliaSonera? #8. And so on.

Credit for this goes to Earl Zmijewski at Renesys (the original article that accompanies these rankings is fascinating as well, and can be found here).

This is certainly not an exhaustive list, but the salient point is that there is both rhyme and reason to why this is happening, and it’s not just about carriers mimicking the actions of their peers or seeing a potential revenue stream. Those providers with the greatest amount of responsibility for IP transit are looking at the changing nature of content delivery and asking how they can streamline their own processes. Augmenting a large IP network with a dedicated CDN to cache and serve high-demand content locally has significant benefits in terms of capex savings, network efficiency and (some) revenue generation. Take a look at who are the other operators with large IP backbones worldwide, and you’ll get a pretty good sense of who might be kicking the tires on the CDN market in 2009. Or at least who should be.