What Is edgesuite.net?

I noticed that the archive of the video stream of today’s Apple press conference has a “non-Apple” URL:

http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1009qpeijrfn/event

Who/what is “edgesuite.net”, I thought.

Whois wasn’t very helpful, so I poked around a little further on my Google search results. Here’s the answer:

Edgesuite.net is run by Akamai Technologies (www.akamai.com). Akamai is a content delivery network (CDN) that is used by a large percentage of Internet sites (something like a ⅓ to ½ of all traffic goes through Akamai). Normally the addresses don’t show up, but sometimes you will see edgesuite.net which is handled by Akamai. In this case, you aren’t the victim of phishing, but rather the website is using external CDN to speed up delivery of your traffic.

Adamai works in the background, making Internet content and commerce delivery seem seamless:

• Akamai has 73,000 servers in 70 countries within nearly 1,000 networks.
• 85% of the world’s Internet users are within a single “network hop” of an Akamai server.
• Akamai can deliver up to 15-20% of Web traffic on any given day.
• Akamai delivers daily Web traffic greater than a Tier-1 ISP, at times reaching more than 2 Terabits per second.
• Akamai delivers hundreds of billions of daily Internet interactions. Updated below
• Akamai helps securely enable more than $100 billion in annual e-commerce for its online retail customers (Source: 2006 revenue compiled by Internet Retailer magazine)
• Cathay Pacific Airways increased online bookings and extranet adoption, and saved more than $1,000,000 annually, through Akamai’s Web Application Acceleration service
• The top online music stores have sold billions of songs… and counting… delivered via the Akamai platform

Posted September 1, 2010 at 11:12 am

Update: September 12, 2014

According to Akami, today the company serves up 2 trillion Internet interactions a day.

The company’s 2014 State of the Internet report has extensive data on DDoS, global connectivity and mobile networks.

The report contains data on connectivity: calling “high broadband” the connections to Akamai at speeds faster than 10 Mbps and “broadband” the connections at 4-10 Mbps.

The United States is not in the top 10.

Even more worrisome:

In the first quarter of 2014, quarterly changes in average peak connection speeds across the top 10 states were decidedly negative.