EdgeCast has taken the steps to strategically place our Points of Presence (POPs) at critical locations both in network terms and geographical terms around the world. The EdgeCast CDN architecture includes local POPs on four continents; North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Our POP locations include Los Angeles, San Jose, Ashburn VA, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, Atlanta, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Sydney. To learn more about these locations, please see our network map. We selected these locations for a number of reasons:

• They are the key strategic Internet exchange and peering locations around the world, where the majority of the Internet traffic is exchanged from carrier network to carrier network. From these locations, your users are only milliseconds away from your content on the EdgeCast CDN.
• Having our POPs located directly at these peering points allows us to tap into both public and private inter-network peering opportunities available to us at these exchange points.

Furthermore, EdgeCast POPs are numerous enough to provide complete global coverage and place the content on the edge of the Internet near end users (especially large concentrations of users), but not so diverse that we are unable to cost-effectively cache and serve video and other large files and downloads. Thus, our clients are able to take full advantage of a CDN architecture with complete global coverage and local POP presence at key exchange points around the world, ensure that their services from EdgeCast are optimized to be the most cost-effective, and benefit from a targeted 100% cache to hit ratio when their content is requested.

POP Architecture
At the heart of the stellar performance of the EdgeCast CDN is our patent-pending EdgeDirector global load balancing technology, which uses proprietary routing algorithms to route users directly to the POP that will serve them the fastest.

EdgeDirectors are located in each EdgeCast POP and take many factors into account for their algorithms including: the number of network hops to the end-user, the geographic location of the user, Internet congestion along the route to the end user, server and data center load and performance, and how many different networks that a user would travel through to access the content. While some legacy CDNs use multi-level DNS to attempt to triangulate the position of a user to determine the best location, the EdgeCast EdgeDirectors monitor that specific user location. So, no matter where that user's DNS server is located (possibly very far from where the user is), the EdgeDirector will know where the user is located and deliver accordingly.

By continuously monitoring these user connections and the general state of the Internet, our EdgeDirectors seamlessly route all users to the EdgeCast POP best for them. EdgeDirectors continuously monitor the health of the Internet, and there will be times when the best POP may not be the one geographically closest to the user - whether due to congestion or performance issues at a certain location. But EdgeDirectors will always route a user to the POP best suited to serve their content as fast as possible.