Türk Telekom signs deal for faster internet access

LONDON - Hürriyet Daily News

The agreement that aims to optimize the network efficiency of Turkey’s current Internet infrastructure was signed by Türk Telekom CEO Tahsin Yılmaz (L) and Akamai CEO Tom Leighton during a press meeting held last week. Company photo

Turkey’s leading communication company Türk Telekom and Akami Technologies, a prominent Infrastructure Service Provider, have signed a remarkable strategic partnership to jointly build and manage a high-capacity Operator Content Delivery Network (OCDN) in Turkey for faster delivery of online content and video.

The agreement that aims to optimize the network efficiency of the country’s current Internet infrastructure was signed by Türk Telekom CEO Tahsin Yılmaz and Akamai CEO Tom Leighton during a press meeting held in London last week.

The partnership will ensure a significant increase in speed and performance for broadband and mobile users in Turkey, particularly when accessing social media and popular online video sites.

Content delivery to be doubled

Yılmaz stressed that they planned to double delivery of Internet and social networks. “Akamai is one of the largest providers of content delivery and cloud services in the world and by providing faster access to popular rich media content within Turkey, both companies will ensure a highly efficient and top performing user experience to all of the stakeholders in the industry,” Yılmaz said at the press meeting.

As the works for the system infrastructure has already begun, the Internet users are slated to benefit the faster delivery of content by the first quarter of 2014, Yılmaz said. Also, any additional cost won’t be charged to the customers, he added. Türk Telekom is currently the biggest player of the sector with 13.7 million Fixed Access Lines, and 7.2 million Broadband connections.

“Our partnership with Türk Telekom is a great way for both companies to bring new, innovative services to market and assist companies doing business inside the country and within the region. Over the coming years, we look forward to innovating together with Türk Telekom on cloud and network optimization solutions,” said Leighton.

This partnership between the two companies will enable Internet users to gain faster access to the content of domestic and international origin made available through the Akamai Intelligent Platform, Leighton said. He noted that the result would be faster page and download times, lower latency, higher quality online video and an even better experience for Internet users in Turkey.

Export opportunities

Tahsin pointed out that as global content would become more distributed to the Türk Telekom infrastructure, also, the data from Turkey could be exported abroad, which would contribute to the Turkish economy.

“This partnership will also significantly reduce our network costs associated with traffic originating from content across the globe. Better yet, we will be making a significant contribution to Turkey’s economy, as data traffic and services within Turkey will be accessed by users in other countries. In a sense, we’ll be exporting data to many international customers,” Yılmaz said. It will also allow Turkish media companies to provide high quality content to their audiences outside of Turkey, he added.

Akamai, which is delivering 15 to 30 percent of the world’s web traffic, is a market share leader in online content and application distribution. Akamai’s global platform redirects the web requests targeting the sites of its contracted content providers to more than 141,000 servers dispersed throughout the world.