

Apple’s CDN Now Live: Has Paid Deals With ISPs, Massive Capacity In Place - ghshephard
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/07/apples-cdn-now-live.html

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geerlingguy
What amazes me is that Apple's infrastructure has markedly improved over the
past few years. I haven't noticed as many Mobile Me/iTools-era sluggishness or
flakiness since at least a couple years ago. And I've yet to get on an
internet connection that isn't saturated by a download from Apple.com or a
related service. Not to say Apple's perfect, but whatever changes they made
after all the Mobile Me fiascos seem to be helping.

~~~
nwh
iMessage is still terrible. Messages don't make it to their destination,
images fail to send properly, messages are duplicated.

~~~
superuser2
In my experience, SMS is still many times worse. Long messages arrive out of
order and parts sometimes do not arrive at all. I've had messages to friends
on AT&T delivered 36 hours late, causing confusion.

iMessage, on the other hand, has mandatory delivery confirmation (so you can
at least know if a message is going to be problematic) and optional read
receipts.

~~~
abritishguy
Is SMS really that bad in the states? It works pretty flawlessly in the UK.

~~~
superuser2
Yes. It's why iMessage exists (and was welcomed with open arms) in the first
place.

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saurik
A few days ago (when this actually launched), I was in a position where I
actually had to map out their network some. The CDN nodes are all
17.253.*.22[1-4], and are located in Los Angeles (22), Chicago (12), Palo Alto
(? this one I found confusing and also thought might be near New Jersey) (18),
Dallas (8), Miami (6), Atlanta (4), New York (2), Seattle (20), San Jose (16),
the Netherlands (32), the UK (34), Austria (66), Hong Kong (64), Japan (68),
Singapore (80), and Germany (48).

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ramy_d
Could someone explain to me what the deal with the ISPs would look like? What
does the deal accomplish? I don't understand because I think the content would
always have to come from their CDN if that's where it's hosted. Are the deals
meant to ensure the shortest trajectory to their CDN network?

~~~
jonknee
ISPs will degrade the requests of their customers if the requested service
doesn't pay a toll (see Netflix for an example). Apple has agreed to pay many
major ISPs so that Apple's bits don't get stuck in the slow lane. It's pretty
shameful that this is required, but that's how it is these days.

~~~
rspeed
Don't spread bullshit.

~~~
couchand
Can you clarify? The GP seems to accurately describe the current regulatory
scheme.

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ksec
I think this is long overdue. Sometimes Apple are really conservatives with
these kind of infrastructure things. Like building enough Datacenter for their
iCloud Services.

It cant be hard for Apple to build a CDN of its own when they have a worldwide
reach in Mobile Network, and most Mobile Network are owned by a Local Telecom
ISP.

I hope their next Keynote will be running on their own CDN.

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nraynaud
I find it strange for Apple, since they are an early investor and customer in
Akamai.

~~~
wmf
It's the difference between strategy and strategy tax. Tim Cook won't pay a
cent more than he has to for anything, even to his best friend.

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grecy
It's pure speculation, but I still believe they have something up their sleeve
to make use of all this bandwidth / data center space. Hopefully we'll see
something soon.

~~~
geerlingguy
The article mentions Apple still hasn't moved over iTunes (store, movie,
music, Match) or Radio service traffic, among other things (those are still on
Akamai/Level3). I'm sure Apple's planning on moving at least some of these
services over to their new CDN.

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iLoch
A CDN like this would be really helpful for that streaming service they're
probably working on.

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jonknee
Which streaming service? They bought one this year along with really expensive
headphones.

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iLoch
I was being general, but yes, I'm going to go ahead and say their acquisition
of Beats may be a leading cause of Apple upping their CDN power, but who
knows.

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trustfundbaby
Does this affect AppleTV any?

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dang
Url changed from [http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/07/apples...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/07/apples-multi-terabit-100m-cdn-is-live-with-paid-connection-
to-comcast/), which points to this.

~~~
mstolpm
When changing a URL, wouldn't it be fair to check first if the same URL was
submitted before? I submitted the now linked URL about 3 hours ago.

~~~
dang
It arguably would be fairer, but solving that problem is trickier than it
sounds, especially in HN's current system—where, for example, post rank decays
rapidly with time.

It's largely random which version of a story ends up making the front page.
We're working on that, but our driving concern is not who the submitter is,
but improving the story quality of the front page. So for the foreseeable
future, it will still be a lottery who gets the credit/karma for submitting a
story. The best way to win the lottery is to enter it often with high-quality
submissions.

~~~
jedberg
The problem here is that the Ars article was better. It was better written and
had additional information.

The original article was poorly written and harder to follow.

I would arguably say you made the front page worse by switching the link.

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dang
I'm surprised you would say that. The Ars piece consists nearly entirely of
quotes from this one.

The current article may not be well-written, but its claim to primacy is
obvious. I have a hard time justifying massively lifted content on the HN
front page.

~~~
jedberg
There's a difference between lifting content and journalism. :)

Ars practices journalism, which means they take a primary source and then
enrich it with useful information while also making it easier to understand.

You're absolutely right in that many blogs simply regurgitate someone else's
content, but Ars is not one of those sites.

If you want to be heavy handed in your moderation and become a content
curator, you'll need to get better at distinguishing the two.

this is one of the reasons we shied away from heavy handed moderation at
reddit -- it's just too difficult to do it well.

Also, primacy doesn't always mean it is better.

~~~
tptacek
That is an... idiosyncratic... definition of "journalism".

