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 has local POPs on four continents; North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. We have selected Los Angeles, San Jose, Ashburn VA, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, Atlanta, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Sydney. To learn more about these locations, please see our network map. We have selected these locations for a number of key reasons, including:

• 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 directed at these peering points allows us to tap into both the public and private inter-network peering opportunities availed 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 with complete global coverage and local POP presence at the 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 (GLB) technology, which uses proprietary routing algorithms to route the users directly to the POP nearest to them, or the POP that will best serve them in terms of content speed.

The EdgeDirectors are located in each EdgeCast POP, and account for a number of factors when they build and update their algorithms, including the number of network hops to the end-user, the physical geographic location of the user, Internet congestion to the end-user, server and data center load and performance, and number of 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 the local DNS server of that user, the EdgeDirector will not be fooled into thinking the user is in a location where they are physically not.

By continuously monitoring these user connections and the general state of the Internet, our EdgeDirectors seamlessly route all users to their local EdgeCast POPs, or, because the EdgeDirectors are continuously monitoring the health of the Internet, in the event of Internet congestion or performance issues at a certain location on the Internet, to the EdgeCast POP that may not be geographically closest to the user, but is best suited to serve the content from a speed and network performance perspective.