BOSTON (03/15/2001) - IP (Internet Protocol) services and hosting company Broadwing Communications and intelligent routing service company Internap Network Services, announced agreements Thursday with content delivery services company Akamai Technologies, each pledging to resell Akamai services.

Broadwing Communications, the fiber-optic backbone subsidiary of Broadwing., will add Akamai's EdgeSuite service, a set of content delivery services bundling many of Akamai's offerings, to the company's managed hosting and collocation services.

Broadwing has built an 18,000-mile (28,800 kilometers) optical fiber network, while Akamai relies on partnerships with fiber owners to provide its own server-based edge-of-network services, said Chris Turner, Akamai's vice president for channel distribution.

"We give a company like Broadwing or Internap, or any of our content delivery partners, the ability to bring content to the edge," he said. "We fill a gap for them."

Internap signed a similar deal to sell Akamai services along with its own, said Bill Hankes, a spokesman for Internap. Internap has no fiber network of its own. Internap works to improve the speed data moves within the Internet for its customers, while Akamai works to move that data out of the Internet to the edge of the network, Hankes said.

Broadwing, in Austin, Texas, can be contacted at http://www.broadwing.com/. Internap, in Seattle, can be reached +1-206-441-8800 or http://www.internap.com/. Akamai, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, can be reached at +1-617-250-3000 or http://www.akamai.com/.