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Technology Stocks : Exodus Communications, Inc. (EXDS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lucinos who wrote (978)	7/30/1999 8:38:00 PM
From: David Lee	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3664

Okay -- I could be wrong, but here's why I think putting Akamai on Exodus defeats the purpose. Akamai's whole deal is putting content on as many networks as possible. Last I heard it was about 900 servers on 20 networks. Having a presence on the networks makes it possible for Akamai to deliver content to people from machines on the same network that they are on, an more then likely one that is very very close to them, both geographically and node-wise. Exodus is about having very stable and high-bandwidth data centers. I forget if it's 8 or 12 or what. But anyway -- they have very few points of presence. The way they bring speed is to peer with all of the networks out there and remove the public internet exchange points from the picture. On the surface, it may seem that Akamai would benefit from these peering relationships too, but for the most part it wouldn't speed anything up. For example -- say you live in Atlanta, GA and you are looking at Yahoo! Finance to see how much money you've made (or lost) on EXDS today. Let's say your ISP is Mindspring. So you type in the URL and your browser hits your local DNS and finds that the closest Yahoo! server is in an Exodus data center in Northern Virginia. So since Mindspring and Exodus have as peering relationship -- your little request packet hops from Mindspring to Exodus and up the East Coast. The Yahoo server responds and spits out your HTML page. The Exodus routers promptly kick it back over to the Mindspring network. Then it travels on Mindspring wires back down to Atlanta. Simple enough and pretty fast too. Now repeat this hopping back and forth for each IMG or OBJ on the page and you have your page. Akamai speeds things up by only making you go to another network once. In the case of Yahoo! Finance, only the original HTML page is taken from the Exodus center in Northern Va -- since Yahoo! is "akamized" your browser is told to just get the images from the closet machine on the Mindspring network, which is probably on your same subnet in Atlanta. So putting Akamai servers on the Exodus network would just be moving the content you want one hop further away than they currently are (since there are no users directly on the Exodus network). I hope that made sense. Later, David