(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In a major upgrade to its global network, content delivery network provider EdgeCast Networks (www.edgecast.com) is adding two new strategic points of presence, Singapore and Paris.
According to EdgeCast Networks’ Thursday announcement, its CDN now interconnects with more than 800 user networks worldwide, making EdgeCast one of the best-connected and fastest CDNs. The Singapore POP completed testing this month and is now online, and the one in Paris is scheduled to go live in the first half of this year.
“With these new points of presence, we bring our customers content even closer to their end users’ digital doorsteps in both Asia and Europe,” EdgeCast Networks chief executive officer Alex Kazerani said in a statement. “Further, we now connect directly to more than 800 end-user networks and ISPs across the globe – and this growing footprint means our customers can often serve content directly to the network their end users are connected to – completely bypassing the increasingly-congested public Internet. This means our customers can be confident that even their largest files will be delivered quickly to any computer in the world.”
The greatest challenge for content distributors, according to EdgeCast, is to overcome the bottlenecks of a congested Internet, especially at long distances and when content travels through many “hops,” which introduce delays, and in many cases contribute significant latency, negatively impacting the end user experience with choppy videos, unreliable web apps, and other usability problems.
CDNs bring files dramatically closer to the end user, resulting in a significant increase in performance and usability.
In an increasing number of cases, on a network like EdgeCast’s, customer content can be served directly to the network a user is connected to, eliminating the need for transit over the public Internet. For instance, a New York-based TV network can now use EdgeCast to serve HD videos to South Asian viewers directly from a Singapore server to the user’s ISP network in Singapore, rather than streaming the content along Internet routes from a far more distant location.
