Akamai's coverage is better still; they've got just about the entire world covered: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/visualizing-akamai/me...
Cloudfront, Google, Fastly, etc. all have pretty good coverage, though you're right they're spottier when it comes to S. America, Africa, and a few other places. Their POPs are, from what I understand, have higher capacity but are less dense. Good for cost savings, though probably worse for latency.
There's also the consideration that most web sites have most of their users in the developed world (though that equation is shifting quickly for a some).
Out of curiosity, what is the significance of "<<" and ">>"? I'm assuming they're not bitwise shift left and right. I've seen them more often as of late, and they seem to come mostly from non-Americans. I ask because they're quite difficult to run an internet search on without knowing what they are called.
This is a really good example. Did you look at Africa? For the record, 1.2 billion people live there nowadays ;)
> Out of curiosity, what is the significance of "<<" and ">>"
Oh, you mean '«' and '»'? They are French quotation marks[1], I try to use the English ones '“' and '”' when I'm writing English, but sometimes I forget. Same for the space before the question and exclamation mark (there is a space in French, but not in English).
Yeah, I looked at it. There are datacenters within 2000km of everywhere, and that's including the Sahara. About 1500km outside of the Sahara.
1500km as the crow flies, so let's say 2400km of fiber. At the speed of light in fiber, that's 11.5 milliseconds. Double it, add time for ten routers, that's 27 milliseconds to go from any ISP line to a Cloudflare data center.
Sounds good to me. If there are infrastructure problems that's a separate issue from whether Cloudflare has enough POPs.
They're quotation marks in many European languages and I believe (though I'm not sure) that the correlation isn't non-Americanness, it's non-English-keyboardness. People from English-speaking countries will still use the quotation marks you're used to.
Beyond the obvious point that the growth of commercial cloud options make it much easier to get servers around the world without having to research providers and negotiate contracts in each country, you might in particular want to spend a couple of minutes looking at current CDN coverage, especially if your experience is either limited or old. Coverage is a lot better globally than it used to be — gone is the time when “Africa” either meant servers in Europe/Israel or, at best, one POP in South Africa. Next, think about services like CloudFlare Workers, Lambda@Edge, etc. and ask what percentage of people on the planet are likely to be close to one of the POPs where you can run code:
https://www.cloudflare.com/network/ — 194 cities in 90 countries
https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/features/ — 191 locations in 33 countries
Only if your «world» means «developed countries only»…