There are plenty of content distribution companies that provide their services all over the globe. Over twenty of them can be selected as noticeable players, over ten – as the most popular CDN (Content Delivery Network) companies.
Usually online-businesses compare these companies on such characteristics as number of PoPs, their presence in different regions, security settings, service flexibility and price policy. These characteristics help to find out which company provides the most useful service for a concrete business. However, the connectivity is not less important indicator as the above mentioned. Some of content distribution companies inform about their connectivity. For example, CDNsun has 19.7 MB/s read speed and 70.6 MB/s write speed if user chooses the SSD storage. But a lot of CDN companies do not inform about how their CDN fast. To compare the connectivity of content distribution companies and find the fastest CDN in different regions, CloudHarmony provided and organized a cloud speedtest. This tool helped to measure throughput and network latency of content distribution companies.
Generally, this test project involved 20 million CDN tests from 5.1 million unique users in four years. Users were coming through three types of speedtests – Network Latency, Small File Throughput and Large File Throughput with 8 byte, 1KB – 80KB and 198KB – 5.1MB amount of data, respectively. Here is some latest data from this test for different regions.
In Europe, results on a Latency test are quite comparable – from 55 ms (Akamai, Level 3, Limelight) to 65 ms (Amason CloudFront and MaxCDN). Microsoft Azure, CDNNetworks and EdgeCast have over 60 ms result, Fastly and Cache Fly – 61ms. The only result, that much slower – over 95 ms – has Internap. Small File Throughput test results show bigger difference. Microsoft Azure, CacheFly and MaxCDN have over 2.5 MB/s speed, EdgeCast and Fastly are over 2.2 MB/s, Amazon CloudFront, Limelight, Internap and CDN Networks are over 1.75 MB/s and Akamai with Level 3 have over 1.1-1.2 MB/s result. Large File Throughput test results show totally different results. CacheFly has the biggest result in this test – over 18.75 MB/s. EdgeCast and Internap CDN have over 14 MB/s result.
Akamai and Microsoft Azure have results over 11 MB/s. CDN Networks, Fastly, Limelight and MaxCDN have over 8 MB/s result. Amazon CloudFront and Level 3 are over 6 MB/s. In Asia Pacific results on a Latency test show the same tendency – comparable results except Internap. The average level on this test in Asia is slower than in Europe – over 100 ms. In Oceania, the average result is 80 ms. Small File Throughput test shows bigger results for all companies except Internap – from 1.75 MB/s to over 3.75 MB/s. The biggest results show Limelight, Fastly, EdgeCast and Akamai. In Oceania, all companies except CacheFly (2.5 MB/s) show the level below 1 MB/s on this test. Large File Throughput test results are smaller in Asia than in Europe for all companies. The biggest level have CacheFly and EdgeCast – over 10 MB/s. In Oceania all companies show results less than 10 MB/s, except CacheFly (over 13 MB/s).