(note: blog collaboration by Mark Grannan, Phillip Karcher and Charlie Dai)

Are you an EdgeCast (now part of Verizon) customer? Chances are good that your traffic into China over the past week has been interrupted or blocked. Verizon claims this is without “rhyme or reason” in their statement.  We can look to the past to see that content censors have previously also stopped YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and we can look to the coming days when China hosts the World Internet Conference in Zhejiang to make guesses as to why.  However, it’s not fruitful to guess at what traffic coming from EdgeCast’s servers has tripped the censors, because we may simply never know.

The alternative? Investigate a multi-CDN strategy across regions that represent unique geographic or political barriers. Not only does this provide fail-over redundancy, but it can be valuable for cost arbitrage and load balancing. Here is a quick summary of the CDNs that we currently track that have delivery capabilities in China:

  • Akamai (via a partnership)
  • CDNetworks
  • China Cache
  • China Net Center

We (Phil and Mark, with our China-based colleague Charlie Dai) have worked to keep tabs on this floating landscape of regional PoPs, and published a table for regional infrastructure (see figure 1-2). If you haven’t seen it, we encourage you to check it out: CDN And Digital Acceleration Vendor Landscape, Q3 2014.