Apple's Content Delivery Network is Now Live

The Content Delivery Network that Apple has been working on since last year is now live in the U.S. and Europe, reports Streaming Media.

Apple’s CDN has gone live in the U.S. and Europe and the company is now delivering some of their own content, directly to consumers. In addition, Apple has interconnect deals in place with multiple ISPs, including Comcast and others, and has paid to get direct access to their networks. Doing trace routes on OS X downloads from multiple ISPs now shows them coming from directly from Apple’s CDN

You can see a sample trace route below:


- te-0-7-0-9-sur02.lowell.ma.boston.comcast.net (68.87.159.37)
- be-21-ar01.needham.ma.boston.comcast.net (68.85.106.45)
- he-1-12-0-0-cr01.newyork.ny.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.90.253)
- he-4-15-0-0-cr01.ashburn.va.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.87.197)
- he-0-11-0-1-pe04.ashburn.va.ibone.comcast.net (68.86.82.222)
- as714-2-c.ashburn.va.ibone.comcast.net (66.208.228.214)
- usqas1-vip-sx-003.aaplimg.com (17.253.0.223)

Apple has reportedly readied massive amounts of capacity. ISPs are estimating the company has more than 10x the capacity that they're using today, ready to go. This comes ahead of OS X Yosemite and iOS 8 which are both expected to launch this fall.

Currently Akamai and Level 3's CDN services are still be used for iTunes, iTunes Radio, and app downloads; however, it's expected that Apple will transition those downloads to its own CDN over time. Streaming Media says the transition is already happening faster than expected. They estimate that Apple has already put into place multiple terabits per second of capacity and by the end of the year should have invested more than $100 million into the CDN.

Level 3 may actually benefit from Apple's CDN because they are selling the company wavelengths, IP transit, fiber and other infrastructure services; whereas, Akamai could lose up to 10% of their revenue from lost business.


The changes aren't expected to affect customers in any way.

Read More [via ArsTechnica]